Virtual Reality Will Be Adopted To Assist Robots And Surgeons In Operation Rooms

Nowadays, it seems like more and more technology that we thought only exists in a sci-fi movie is being realized. One of them is under development by Vicarious Surgical, a start-up in Charlestown. If they are successful with what they are working on, this new method may enable surgeons to perform surgical procedures on a patient from a great distance.

To make this easier to understand, imagine a patient in Idaho is ready for surgery. Doctors insert a tiny robot into his or her body and on the other side of the country, another doctor starts wearing a headset and takes the controllers to carry out the operation.

Ever since their first met in MIT, Adam Sachs and Sammy Khalifa, the co-founders of the firm, have been dedicating their time to this project. It has been about 5 years since they worked together to make this kind of technology come to life.

The team at Vicarious Surgical

What excites the two founders is that there is a considerable potential of their miniature robot to be combined with something like the Oculus Rift, virtual reality headset that enables the wearer to see the inside of the human body.

However, according to Sachs, this idea did not just suddenly materialized out of the blue. It was the result of 2 or 3 weeks of work. Their robots are getting better inside human bodies and virtual reality technology will allow them to work better inside the body.

The startup is getting noticed and drawing support from funds like Gates Frontier, Khosla Ventures, Innovative Endeavors, Jerry Yang’s firm, as well as investors like Marc Benioff and Neil Devani. In total, it now has around $31.8 million in investment for its cornerstone technology.

The company is receiving fund from Gates Frontier

Sachs and Khalifa said that this tech can be applied to a wide range of other fields, some of them might even lead to results faster than healthcare but they want to make this area a priority. Sachs shared that healthcare was what they felt the most significant. He also said they were blessed to work on a kind of technology that was exciting technically and at the same time, had the potential to do good deeds to the society.

Sachs came from a family that is not short of entrepreneur spirit nor love for science. His father is currently working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also helps found Desktop Metal, a company specialized in 3D-printing.

Their humanoid robot is based on the work of many other robotic projects. Sachs said the mechanized human arms would possess similar dexterity to a real one. There would be a camera on the shoulders as well as a robotic take of the human head.

This will allow surgeons to operate from afar as they have control of the robot’s every motion. The doctor can be just in the immediate vicinity or at a greater distance away like in the example above. Of course in the latter situation, a reliable Internet connection is required.

The virtual reality surgeons see when wearing the headset allows them to see what the robots see and even see the arms of the robot. They do that by observing and recording a surgeon’s every movement related to operating and make the robot model them.

The company’s founders and its investors both aim at the same target, which is to lower the cost of high impact surgeries as well as improve the accessibility to top doctors regardless of the geological distance.

Virtual reality will be of great help

Robots that work in healthcare are in great demand with recent spending of Johnson & Johnson to buy lung cancer diagnostics and surgical robots from Auris Health with a price of $3.4 billion. The company also revealed that they would pay out $2.35 million more if Auris made a major breakthrough with their technology.

According to Allied Market’s report, the market for this kind of robot is worth about $90 billion in 2024. In 2017, this value stood at $56,294.9 million, showing a growth rate of 8.5%. This market is made up of three components including systems, accessories, and services. While accessories yield the most revenue, owing to the fact that after each procedure, the accessories are often replaced; services are projected to see the fastest growth rate due to the rise of robotic assistants. North America is to retain its leading position in the global surgical robotics market because of better infrastructure and widespread adoption.

Dror Berman, a director of Innovation Endeavors is quite confident that the future of healthcare technology will lie in medical robots and minimally invasive surgeries. The also said that they were interested in fuel the kind of breakthrough inventions that have the power to alter the whole business.

Dror Berman

There are 900,000 out of 313 million operations that have the involvement of medical robots and this is still a small rate. In addition, their high cost makes them inaccessible to the general mass. However, what Vicarious is doing can bring about a chance for more people to approach and afford higher-quality surgeries as well as surgeons.

Sachs and Khalifa’s robots can also solve another pressing issue. A large number of hospitals cannot stretch their budget enough to acquire a $2 million tool and by designing a robot that is small and can work inside patient’s body, it will be a long term solution, fitting for smaller institutions.

In the future when Vicarious branch out to other procedures, the hospitals and have more and more of their practices taken over by the robots. The best-case scenario is that the majority of their surgical operations will have the involvement of robots.

The startup’s robot is currently doing tests in labs and their founders do not confirm or reject the inquiry of whether they would use animals as the subject. For now, they are using models of the human body and several tests have been conducted.

Sachs said that democratization was their ultimate goal for this technology. The benefits of this robot would not be limited to major cities and large hospitals but reach even less well-off parts of the US and the world.