The expert spoke about the role of robots in medicine in the next 20 years

MOSCOW, August 24 – PRIME. The number of operations in the field of medicine with the help of robot assistants in Russia can reach 30-40% in the next 20 years, Arthur Shimanovsky, head of the robotics laboratory of the NTI Competence Center, told RIA Novosti at the Technoprom-2022 forum.

“Robots are already helping doctors on a slave-master system, where a person fully controls all processes and the patient’s health, and the robot assists him. It is possible that in the next 20 years the number of operations with the help of assistant robots will reach 30-40% …. Only over the past 6 years, the number of operations has tripled,” the expert noted.

Minimally invasive operations are also carried out with the help of robots, when the doctor makes a series of small incisions using surgical instruments attached to the ends of long rods. Robotic systems help in the operation, in particular, they transmit the movements of the fingers, hands and wrists of the doctor, correct the actions of instruments inside the human body and stabilize the position of the surgeon’s hands.

However, such operations are four times more expensive than conventional operations due to the high purchase cost of equipment and consumables. This factor, as noted by Shimanovsky, may slow down the introduction of medical robotic systems in Russian clinics.

“The next logical step in the development of medical robotics for the next 10 years will be the development of a robotic system capable of fully autonomously performing minimally invasive operations. There are technological opportunities for this: artificial intelligence, computer vision, lidars, collaborative robots,” the expert believes.