The NYU Langone Health Center Hospital announced on October 22 that they successfully completed a double lung transplant using robots on a 57-year-old woman. The procedure used robots, and it turned out to be less intrusive compared to operations that don’t use assistance from a robot.
As robots and artificial intelligence develop every day, their impact on service industries, such as banking and delivery, also simultaneously increases. The addition of artificial intelligence in these sectors eases our lives, as it can handle several everyday tasks far more efficiently than humans, such as apps like Google Maps which finds you the fastest route to go somewhere and Amazon which offers personalized product recommendations through the use of AI. However, when we consider the idea of AI and robots controlling more complex and vital affairs, it is much more concerning to humanity. For example, an ongoing debate in the area of medicine is whether robots will be the next doctors. In this context, the recent news from the NYU Langone Health Center provides valuable insight to the role of robots in the healthcare industry, particularly surgical operations.
The patient Cheryl Mehrkar, a 57-year-old woman, is a resident in upstate New York. Before the surgery, she suffered from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and her symptoms worsened after getting the COVID-19 virus. COPD is an airway and lung disease that restricts breathing. The disease causes blockage in your airway and creates irreversible damage. Primary symptoms of COPD include difficulty taking deep breaths, frequent coughing with mucus, and sound coming from lungs, all of which make everyday life remarkably difficult.
Mehrkar recalls times that she noticed her symptoms getting worse: "I remember I had to take a call at a nursing home as an EMT, and the 85-year old security guard got up those stairs better than I could," she said. "I knew, this was not good."
Being sidelined due to her disease was tough for her, as she had an active life working as an EMT, as well as owning a karate school with her husband, and being a motorcycle-enthusiast. She has been looking for help for many years until coming across the NYU Langone.
She explains her excitement about the transplant news after months of rigorous evaluation: "Once they put me on the list, I figured, OK, I have a couple more months to go. And five days later, I got the call. They said they have a 98% match. And how soon can you get here? And my first reaction was 'You know what? I'll be there in two hours.'"
The robot used in the procedure uses the Da Vinci Xi system, found by Intuitive Surgical, which provides advanced capabilities such as high-definition 3D imaging and flexible, jointed movements that mimic a surgeon's natural hand motions but with greater precision and control. This advanced technology results in remarkable benefits such as reduced post-operative pain, quicker recovery times, and minimized scarring.
Soon, the date of her transplant arrived. Doctors started working with the robot. It entered the body and started removing the diseased lungs. Afterwards, they prepared the surgical site for implantation and successfully placed the donor lungs.
Approximately a month after the procedure, only a few days before her discharge from the hospital, Mehrkar was able to walk and move with ease.
This double lung transplant performed by robots shows how advanced the medical technologies have gotten in the past few years. As stated in the beginning, medicine is agreeably one of the most vital and risky industries that AI and robots can be used in.
Evidence like this shows how beneficial it is for treating diseases that are major and perhaps even fatal. Alongside reducing the invasive techniques used in manual surgeries, AI can plan-out surgeries accurately and find solutions to sudden problems that can arise. Besides, doctors may make inaccurate comments or false decisions, as can every human being, and AI or robots can help with minimizing these mistakes.
Although the errors are minimal, one of the main concerns about AI in medicine is that robots can not make as reliable decisions about human life as humans can. Whether it is about ethical concerns or the level of risk that the patient is taking with the treatment, a human opinion is generally a lot more reliable and reassuring. Thus, although many people are excited to see artificial intelligence take more place in medicine, there is certainly a community that is highly concerned about the role of it in healthcare.
In the future, AI is expected to provide more personalized treatment options tailored for every patient’s own gene structure and support critical medical decisions to an extent that we cannot even fathom today. To clarify, although technology is significantly advanced and rapidly improving, AI and robots are not expected to replace human doctors anytime soon due to the ongoing concerns regarding human health. There is certainly a long way ahead of AI in medicine, and it is captivating for science and medicine enthusiasts to watch the development of AI in this field.
Edited By: Melisa Altıntaş, Yağmur Ece Nisanoğlu