How an AI learned to stitch up patients by studying surgical videos

You probably wouldn’t want a surgeon to stitch you up if they’d learned their craft by studying YouTube videos. But what about a robot? The prospect might not be as fanciful as it sounds. Researchers from UC Berkeley, Intel, and Google Brain recently taught an AI model to operate by imitating videos of eight human surgeons at work. The algorithm — known as Motion2Vec — was trained on footage of medics using da Vinci surgical robots to perform suturing tasks such as needle-passing and knot-tying. The da Vinci system has been operating on patients — including James Bond on one occasion — since the early 2000s. Typically, the robot is controlled by a…

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