Messy
Surgery on earth is pretty messy, I hate to imagine what it would be like in micro gravity, there's going to have to be a lot of suction.
NASA is funding research to build an autonomous robot gripper theoretically capable of performing medical surgery, and which is to be launched to the International Space Station in 2024. The machine, named MIRA, will be developed by engineers at Virtual Incision, a startup spun out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the …
Nice project; practical me says you still want a ships doctor if you absolutely must take a human crew.
Speed of light means that comms to Mars are impractical for telemedicine at that range. Although I suppose it would be possible to have a doctor cover multiple ships and facilities by telemedicine if already in the local area.
Leonid Rogozov? The Soviet doctor who did the same thing but in the Antarctic? Only with abit more room and gravity to help with things.
Beer icon because there isn't a vodka one.
Very sensible decision, that. The big problem with surgery is that, despite the generality of anatomic features, the internal detail of every individual is rather different.. Consequently, a surgeon needs a well developed ability to understand the significance of what they're looking at and respond appropriately very swiftly. I'm not at all convinced that, even in 50-100 years, we will have created automata that can understand anything - if for no other reason that that we don't understand how understanding actually works despite it having been studied assiduously and quite rigorously for well over 100 years.
"a surgeon needs a well developed ability to understand" ... and ... "we don't understand how understanding actually works"
Maybe we need an equivalent of the Turing Test, this time for understanding.
I'm just thinking that every use of this surgeon in the micro gravity of Low earth Orbit will eventually become part of the training data set for an eventual bot to do one-G to zero-G surgery. Which is amazing, so I expect that these will eventually be deployed on Earth (1.0 g). And the Moon (0.16 g) and Mars (0.38 g), to maximise data harvesting to make them better.
The real problem for the US would be that it needs the approval of the American Medical Association for use in the US and its territories - and that will never happen, since they fully control the monopoly (what would their quarter of a million members think). It is even funny that it would align very well with their mission statement "to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health."
Family friend went in for neck surgery at Mayo clinic. Robot nicked his carotid artery causing a slow bleed that was not detected. That led to an eventual clot and then a stroke. What should have been a routine surgery of a minor tumor ended up disabling him.
No thanks to robotic surgery, it is not ready for prime time yet.
This type of remote manipulation system was first described by Robert A Heinlein in his short novel "Waldo", published in August 1942, so its only taken 80 years to realize. The novel is in a book, "Waldo and Magic, Inc" together with a rather different story, "Magic Inc", also written by Heinlein.
Seriously, a nice job by the team:.This is a good and useful thing to finally have up and working.