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Comment by downrightmike | Hacker News Reader

It reduces fatigue, I can see why doctors are opting to use the robots. It extends how much the Doc can do and do it well. I'd be interested in seeing the data and how robots impact the day in day out ability to perform surgeries. It may not be case specific efficient, but on a whole are the doctors doing better work and more of it?

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The article says "However, the two approaches have comparable patient outcomes and lengths of hospital stay, the study showed."

So it looks like the answer to the question "are doctors doing better work" is "No".

The answer to "are the patients doing better?" is no. "Is the doctors efficiency outside the surgery more?" is what the parent seems to be asking. There might be confounding variables like the doctors experience level coming into play. Are less experienced doctors more likely to use robotic surgery and still produce results that a more experienced doctor does?

Also, robots might get faster one we better understand them and that can be applied to all robots. Each humans will have to be trained individually and knowledge transfer might not be the same i.e. each human doctor starts as amateur vs robots.

I'm just playing devils advocate here.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26582...

Not necessarily. This is an observational study, so it might be the case that robotic surgery is employed in harder cases, which compensates for its advantages.

In response to "are the doctors doing [...] more of it?":

The article also said "Robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery to remove a patient’s entire kidney requires slightly longer operating times"

I'm guessing that if the operating times are longer than the doctors can't do more work because the Operating Rooms are still in use.

And that's not even thinking about the possible safety and/or legal requirements that might exist, such as "any active, ongoing surgery must have a doctor actively overseeing it, at all times".

Robotic surgery is not autonomous. The surgeon is in complete control and provides the only decision making input into the surgery.

I definitely agree. Not to mention that there is a limit to what a human surgeon is capable of without some sort of augmentation. If this technology is going to improve it needs to be used in the field.

Also, doesn't the robot approach enable off-site doctors to perform the procedure?

No. None of the current systems enable that, since a surgeon needs to be ready to take over if the system becomes unavailable due to some failure.

Indeed! From what I know of prior research, the latency issues with regards to remote control of these robotic systems was unlikely to ever reach clinical use but has been explored to a small degree.

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