“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Stanford University have taught a robot surgical system to perform a bunch of surgical tasks as capably as human doctors, simply by training it on videos of those procedures.

The team leveraged a da Vinci Surgical System for this study. It’s a robotic system that’s typically remote controlled by a surgeon with arms that manipulate instruments for tasks like dissection, suction, and cutting and sealing vessels…

Using a machine learning method known as imitation learning, the team trained a da Vinci Surgical System to perform three tasks involved in surgical procedures on its own: manipulating a needle, lifting body tissue, and suturing…

The surgical system not only executed these as well as a human could, it also learned to correct its own mistakes. ‘Like if it drops the needle, it will automatically pick it up and continue. This isn’t something I taught it do,’ said Axel Krieger, an assistant professor at JHU who co-authored a paper on the team’s findings.”

From New Atlas.