Roadmap to Autonomous Surgery -- A Framework to Surgical Autonomy
This work addresses the challenge of achieving autonomous surgery for medical professionals and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing partial automation efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of advancing surgical automation by proposing a framework and checklist to guide the development of higher levels of autonomy in robotic surgery, based on breaking down automation tasks into required features.
Robotic surgery has increased the domain of surgeries possible. Several examples of partial surgical automation have been seen in the past decade. We break down the path of automation tasks into features required and provide a checklist that can help reach higher levels of surgical automation. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and advances required to make this happen.