It’s this 100%. This is being driven by several factors but the main one is cost. Finance departments are targeting high paying jobs and looking at what they can do without.

Think about it, you are a hospital having a horrible time with staff turnover in your breast pathology group. You have 5 headcount open for a team of 10 (15 total headcount). You have had these job openings listed since the pandemic. To meet your patients needs you have been sending out to another lab.

Now a sales rep for a medical automation company comes in and shows you examples of how you can increase your overall throughput with your current staff by switching certain tests and protocols to a digital scanner, as well improve TAT for your HEME testing to 24-48hrs.

Are you going to continue holding capital in reserve to add incremental headcount? Or are you going to outlay capital for a more efficient solution? Different HCO’s make different decisions, but the largest clinics are all diving into automation headfirst not toefirst.

Any of those specialities you’re naming as ‘on the chopping block’ due to automation…that automation will still have to be verified by a set of human eyes. AI can have a massive databank of scans but nothing has replaced the eyes of experienced doctors when it comes to discrepancies or additional testing.

It's controlled by the surgeon

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I’m sorry where do I say automation is going to replace the whole department? I say incremental increasing of headcount will be curtailed due to automation increasing efficiency of current staff. You just would rather invent my words to argue against a point I never made.

You say it’s easier to replace truck drivers than doctors, but it’s not that simple. You need to think about the task being done. Is it easier for a robot to read off a genetic sequence data file or drive a car?

The robot has massively changed the game in oropharynx cancers. Before the robot we would have to split the mandible or do a lingual release to access these tumors. Especially with the healthier, younger HPV-related population, we have been able to cure their disease with limited impact on quality of life.

I’m not sure what is special about the robot in the article. I suspect it’s mostly for marketing.

He looks like a real human, so wonderful😭

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Surgery is one part of specialized medicine.

Makes sense. That way any collateral damage would be considered preventative ontological care. A win for society!

Your subreddits are mostly teenagers, Pokemon, dota, and crypto. I think we're done here.

No, you're off the loop. The police chief said it won't have a gun, just bombs.

It blows the cancer away.

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from the images, I wonder if versius is meant to be a single-arm robot versus the multi-arm-options of davinci? like, smaller and more affordable?

The problem with these robots is that they are mega expensive. This results in other related problems. Namely, A hospital cannot buy a lot of them. This means that the surgical residents at these hospitals can only log so many hours on the machine (at places Ive trained, it was mostly reserved for senior residents. So training is limited. Hospitals also cant really afford to have two different brands, and residents also dont really have time to learn two different brands. So again, training becomes limited.

Why is this a problem? Because training in surgery is massively important. Stuff has to become so second nature that unexpected issues need to be semi-familiar or at least things you can deal with since the main issues are happening almost in the background of your head. So by making training so difficult, it actually limits the usefulness of these robots as you have fewer people who can allocate time (sufficient time) to learn one, and even fewer that can allocate time to learn more than one.

As a total aside, Im not in surgery, so take with grain of salt, but I dont see the actual present day utility of these machines. Every robotic Ive observed in school was basically something you could do in probably half the time manually. I could very well be missing the nuances and underestimating problems that arise with manual vs robotic. And it also could be a more preparing for the future, when these machines are more useful and need ready users. But as they currently stand, I dont get the hype about robitic surgeries.

I’ve worked with robots so I know what I’m talking about. You clearly don’t so just stop.

Yeah. That's why I said the papers. This is a complicated area of oncology and requires some in-depth knowledge.

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It looks just like a human. Tech has come so far, wow.

Throat Goat

this is obviously a big advance in medical science, but I'd be lying if I said I was totally comfortable with the idea of a robot with chopping blades shawshanking its way down my esophagus

article author was confused when someone said "Dr Higgs is a surgical machine"

I think that person is talking about “replacing the department” with ONE pathologist, so the repetitive, tedious portions can be automated, and a human specialist to confirm or mark exceptions - not have AI determine my grandmother’s cancer treatment.

I’m not saying it’s easier to train a bus driver, but I am challenging the notion that AI will replace blue collar worker first (or only them), and that somehow will free us up to pursue more white collar or professional careers.

And those careers are not immune, IBM’s Watson has been advising lung cancer treatment at Sloan-Kettering nearly 10 years. AI’s playing GO or Jeopardy may seem trivial but represent accelerating change in AI space and thus real challenges for many career fields. And the higher salary jobs represent that much greater incentive for automation.

I wasn’t making a jab that doctors, but the complexity of your job is no guarantee that it will be replaced only long after truck are driving themselves.

And who knows, maybe in 10 years I will be comfortable having an AI provider deciding my grandmas treatment - and I may not be the minority.