Engineers build a robot to perform surgery without a doctor

“Doctors are not being replaced,” Kang said.

Dr. Michael Awad, the director of the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Comprehensive Robotics Program in St. Louis, was not involved in STAR’s development but has been following the work at Hopkins. He did his surgical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital and trained on the first generation of da Vinci robot there.

Awad said it’s still early in the process, but he believes autonomous robots are inevitable in the operating room and the Hopkins researchers work could be a big step forward.

How long it take the public — and surgeons — to accept such technology remains to be seen, he said.

He views it like those autonomous cars. People are ready to adopt the park-assist technology Krieger referenced and other technology to keep people from drifting into other lanes. The fully self-driving cars will prove trustworthy eventually, as well.

“While driving is high stakes and can result in injury or death, I think people are even more sheepish when it comes to surgery on the human body,” he said. “There are a lot more variables that make the task more challenging in itself. There is a higher bar to leap.”

Awad, who is also director at the Washington University Institute for Surgical Education, said there is a lot of training that goes into using existing robotic equipment. Doctors have to learn to use other senses such as their eyes on computer screens, rather than the touch of human tissue, when they use technology.