Some brave soul volunteered for a completely robotic dental surgery

Authored by engadget.com and submitted by mixplate
image for Some brave soul volunteered for a completely robotic dental surgery

Prior to the surgery, the robot was oriented to the patient's head and mouth and researchers then programmed the device with all of the necessary information for it to complete the procedure. That included the angles and depth required for accurate placement of the implants. After testing the programmed movements, the operation was carried out. It took about an hour and though medical staff were present during the procedure, none of them assisted the robot while it worked. Afterwards, the staff determined that the robot had implanted the teeth with high precision.

Due to a dentist shortage, South China Morning Post reports that while around 400 million people need dental implants in the country, only about one million are done each year. Further, when people turn to less qualified individuals in order to get needed dental work done, they often end up with additional problems. Robots stand to increase service rates and complete operations with fewer errors.

I'm not sure what's scarier -- a human dentist or a robot dentist. But you can check out the video below for some shots of the robot in action.

bboyjkang on September 22nd, 2017 at 23:18 UTC »

Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcKFLYPBLl8 [1:51]

Before operation, patient needs to take a CT (computed tomography) scan to acquire all the data of the patient's skull and jaw, and then the data are stored through a special marking system, so that the robot arm can identify the corresponding location precisely in the non-open space and finish the dental implant surgery.

1:22 The biggest advantage of the robot is high precision with a error of 0.2 to 0.3 millimeters

unusually_awkward on September 22nd, 2017 at 22:46 UTC »

This is the future of medicine - robotic surgeons with human oversight will perform most routine surgical procedures by the middle of this century. A lot of things that are done only by hand can be done so much more precisely by a sufficiently programmed robot. As we get better and better at making sensors and integrating them into machines, they'll only get more precise and accurate. It's pretty exciting to see technological innovations like this.

utack on September 22nd, 2017 at 20:20 UTC »

brave or broke soul?