This article was amended on May 6, 2016.
Four Yorkshire piglets have made history by becoming the first patients to be stitched up after an operation by a fully automated surgeon.
Experts said that the experiments marked the threshold of a new era in which humans would steward scalpel-wielding machines that did the bulk of the work under their own steam.
Known as Star — short for “smart tissue autonomous robot” — the self-guided arm sewed up the four pigs’ small intestines with more precision than an experienced human surgeon, although it took more than five times as long.
The animals survived with no complications. Peter Kim, the paediatric surgeon who led the work, said that it would only be a matter of time before the device was ready to be used on people.
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He predicted that it would soon allow doctors anywhere in the world to download programs and use robots to carry out operations that would be quicker, cheaper and less erratic than even the most skilful human could manage.
“Imagine that you need a surgery or your loved one needs a surgery,” Dr Kim said. “Wouldn’t it be critical to have the best surgeon’s techniques available to you and your loved ones that would guarantee a successful clinical outcome? And then obviously, if it is the best technique that would ensure safety, and then if you’re able to program something like that into a machine, it could potentially be available for anybody, anywhere in the world, and hence it will reduce complications associated with it.”
Star uses fluorescent stickers to orientate itself and builds up a three dimensional picture of the body parts in front of it to within an accuracy of about a millimetre.
In a series of experiments, described in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the robot competed against the Da Vinci — a joystick-guided surgical machine widely used in the NHS — and a human surgeon with seven years’ experience.
It outperformed the Da Vinci in some measures. On stitching up live pigs’ intestines it turned out to be neater and more effective than the surgeon but it took an average of 50 minutes, compared with just eight minutes for the human.
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Dr Kim said that Star would become quicker with practice. “Fundamentally, it’s really an intelligent sewing machine, so you can make it as fast as you want,” he said. “Even with a very primitive prototype, it’s as good as an experienced surgeon. It will get better with time, I’m sure.”
British experts were more circumspect about the new device. Christopher Ogden, one of the country’s most experienced robotic surgeons, who has carried out more than 100 prostate operations at the Royal Marsden hospital in London, said that it was unlikely the machine would be able to cope with anything more than the most routine procedures.
He was concerned that the robot would struggle with the variability from one human body to another and that it was not yet accurate enough to carry out most kinds of surgery safely.
Shafi Ahmed, a consultant surgeon at the Royal London Hospital who last month conducted the first operation in the world to be live-streamed on video, said that the robot surgeon was a small but important step forward, though its usefulness would be limited.
“Ultimately, at some point we will reach a surgical singularity where robots are able to perform parts of the operation,” he said. “But what you’re paying for with a [human] surgeon is the communication and the decision-making when things go wrong. Surgeons are going to have a role that will probably never be replaced entirely by robots.”
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Correction: We considerably understated the number of robotic prostatectomy procedures carried out by Christopher Ogden of the Royal Marsden hospital in London (News, May 5). Rather than “more than 100”, he has performed nearly 2,000.