Surgeons send self-navigating, tiny robot into heart valves

In a first, surgeons have sent a small, self-navigating robot into a heart’s value in order to detect any signs of leakage.

In a successful experiment conducted on pigs, researchers used an autonomous surgery robot that autonomously finds its way into a leaky valve in the animal’s heart.

The robot and the surgery marks the start of the shift from robotic surgical tools to complete robot-assisted surgeries, where autonomous devices can truly take off the load of overburdened human doctors, as per study published in journal Science Robotics.

The robot finds its way to the leaky valve on its own by hugging the walls of the heart as it navigated with the help of artificial intelligence and a camera to figure out its location, reported Futurism.

“The algorithms help the catheter figure out what type of tissue it’s touching, where it is in the heart, and how it should choose its next motion to get where we want it to go,” said researcher Pierre DuPont.

The team said that this achievement marks the beginning of automated surgeries where robots handle the mundane tasks. “The right way to think about this is through the analogy of a fighter pilot and a fighter plane,” said DuPont. “The fighter plane takes on the routine tasks like flying the plane, so the pilot can focus on the higher-level tasks of the mission.”