Modern surgeons can do amazing things to repair a body, but they still have a couple of drawbacks. First, there aren't enough of them, and the skilled surgeons we have aren't distributed equally around the world. Second, they still have human-sized hands and fingers. Very tiny, precise surgical repairs are the province of highly-trained microsurgeons -and robots.
Sony introduced their new Microsurgery Assistance Robot at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation. It can be controlled by a trained microsurgeon from a distance, but since it has a microscope for viewing and scaled-up controls, it can be used by surgeons who are not specialists in microsurgery. Imagine being able to fix tiny holes in delicate blood vessels, inside a body where the problem is not exposed by a large incision. In this demonstration video, the robot uses various instruments to cut and then stitch up that cut on a single kernel of corn. We hope the ear is recovering nicely. -via Laughing Squid
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