As robotics and artificial intelligence technologies advance, their combined use in medicine will become pronounced as time marches on. Both robotics and artificial intelligence are widely used in the medical field today. Robotics are used in surgery to assist doctors in delicate procedures, robotic exoskeletons are used in rehabilitation from injury or illness, and so on. Artificial intelligence is used to assess diagnoses and treatment plans, as well as accelerating medical research and drug development. How, then, can these technologies be combined to improve medical practices and health outcomes? In a perspective for Science, Dr. Michael Yip and colleagues discuss the present and future of artificial intelligence and medical robots. Here I will summarize and comment on their findings. The first region of medicine Yip and colleagues query with respect to artificial intelligence medical robots is image guidance and surgery. While robots may have been used previously to assist in image capturing, for example, when detecting lesions or other malicious tissues, human assistance was always required to recognize the tissue and diagnose. Artificial intelligence presents the opportunity to both drive robots during biopsies to detect dangerous masses as well as create diagnoses for what the masses may be. Artificial intelligence systems may leverage data from previous diagnostic studies to make highly accurate predictions about the mass, to be confirmed by the physician, saving both the patient and the physician valuable time and resources.
Full commentary : The Synergy Of Artificial Intelligence And Robots In Medical Practice.