HACKER Q&A
📣 h_tbob

Using AI to repair spinal cord injury


This is a tech forum, not a medical one, but I'll ask anyway.

In the future, robots will obviously be doing surgery. Is it feasible to think that a robot with sufficient number of limbs and microscopes could actually repair a spinal cord injury, instead of doing something like neuralink to fix it?

  👤 yawpitch Accepted Answer ✓
Autonomous robotic surgery, even for relatively simple and usually routine procedures, is way off. Robots are currently in use in numerous surgeries as highly precise and repeatable assistants / instruments, but the state of the art on robot safety doesn’t come close to the point of even allowing minimal autonomy, and these devices are all carefully and precisely controlled by direct human operators. Human bodies are just not that consistent or predictable an operating (excuse pun) environment to allow much else without significant development from today’s state of the art.

On the level of spinal surgery, I’d doubt it, unless we’re talking nanoscale machines capable of manipulating tissues as small as single synaptic junctions at the terminal ends of axons and dendrites. Maybe if we developed some chemical or other material that allowed direct neuron regrowth and reattachment and all you needed was precise alignment of the spinal cord itself then there’d be some positioning limit that robots could reach that humans couldn’t, but it’s all very much in the realm of science fiction at the moment.

👤 gcheong
Maybe but depending on the time frame something like this might be more feasible: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/11/dancing-molecu...
👤 reify
And there will be form to sign with two questions:

1. Do you want a fully qualifed spinal cord human surgeon who has spent many years studying and practicing his art to operate on you?

2. Do you want some fantasy shiny robot made of titaniun, driven by AI, which uses the combined knowledge of spinal cord surgeons to operate on you?

its a 1 for me...

👤 duped
Why do you need AI to work at a scale smaller than surgical teams already can, instead of better robotics?