Anything is possible. One immediate limitation I see is the culture of surgeons. The surgeon is the final authority in the OR. If a software program tries to tell him or her that they are doing something wrong during a procedure, then I can envisage that console finding itself in the dumpster. In addition, how many patients would be willing to consent to allow a software driven robot to perform their surgery? The thought certainly scares me. This is akin to autopilots in the aviation industry. The autopilot tech has been around since the 1980’s and has been mostly successful, but at the same time it has caused some catastrophic events due to unforseeable situations that the planes got into and the autopilot program wasn’t programmed to handle the situation. This has cost human lives and the flying public is not willing to get on a plane without pilots at the controls. Since there is a lot of overlap between safety engineering in aviation and in surgery, and in aviation they have concluded that human judgement will be part of the equation and in fact will also be the final authority for the time being, I don’t see any reason why the outcome would be any different in the scenario you are proposing where Verb/J&J come out with some highly advanced data driven software that controls the robot. In addition, anything they create that poses a threat to the job security of the surgeons would naturally be highly resisted by the surgeons.
Great discussion. In essence, we really don’t have anything to be concerned about because, much like google glass, this would be a flop at worst and very very slow to integrate at best...meaning at least a decade IMO.
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