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Robots learning to imitate surgeons — challenges and possibilities

Nature Reviews Urology (2024)Cite this article

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Autonomous surgical robots have the potential to transform surgery and increase access to quality health care. Advances in artificial intelligence have produced robots mimicking human demonstrations. This application might be feasible for surgical robots but is associated with obstacles in creating robots that emulate surgeon demonstrations.

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Fig. 1: Outline of an imitation-based autonomous surgical robot.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for Comp/IS/Eng-Robotics under Grant No. DGE 2139757 and NSF/FRR 2144348.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Samuel Schmidgall

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Ji Woong Kim & Axel Krieger

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  1. Samuel Schmidgall
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  2. Ji Woong Kim
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  3. Axel Krieger
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Correspondence to Samuel Schmidgall.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Schmidgall, S., Kim, J.W. & Krieger, A. Robots learning to imitate surgeons — challenges and possibilities. Nat Rev Urol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41585-024-00873-z

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