New surgical robotics centre at Montreal General Hospital

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) inaugurated a new surgical robotics centre at the Montreal General Hospital on Wednesday. According to its director, it brings surgery fully into the 21st century by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence.

“The mission of the SuPER is to develop the next generation surgical robotics and artificial intelligence technologies for the future of surgery,” said the centre’s director and founder, Dr. Amir Hooshiar.

The Surgical Performance Enhancement and Robotics Centre (SuPER) brings robotics and AI to many medical disciplines, including cardiology, radiology and multiple forms of surgery. The goal of the centre is to make medical procedures less invasive, more personalized, safer and more effective.

“When I was training, we were doing big open operations, and people were staying a week in hospital and taking months to recover because of that big incision,” said Dr. Liane Feldman, professor and chair of the department of surgery at McGill University and surgeon-in-chief at the MUHC, explaining how thirty years ago, surgery was “transformed” to be much less invasive, with tiny surgical cuts and quick recovery.

“We’re looking at the next phase of transforming surgery to become even less invasive,” she said.

Hooshiar says some of the procedures the centre’s robots are enabling surgeons to do are “unprecedented.” According to him, there are areas in the body–in the heart, head, neck, brain and lungs–that are hard to surgically access.

“We are developing technologies that enable surgeons to have access to those areas in the body, basically getting ahead of the sickness before it’s too late,” he said.

The only hospital-based centre of its kind in Canada, SuPER is located at the Montreal General Hospital.

“Having it in a hospital means that we’re very close to what the problems are,” Feldman said. “We have those daily interactions.”

SuPER relies on a fleet of intelligent robotic platforms, most of which were developed within the Clinical Innovation Platform of the Research Institute of the MUHC. One of the centre’s surgical robots is a “soft robot”–designed to get into hard-to-access areas of the body–with artificial appendages fashioned based on the structure of snakes or elephant trunks.

The daVinci Xi Surgical System is a robot with the two units: a patient unit and a surgeon unit. It is designed so the surgeon sits at the console and moves the handles of two handpieces. The surgeon’s movement on the handpieces transfers over a connection to the surgical robot that is actually moving the surgical instruments themselves on the patient.

Hooshiar says these innovations are important so the healthcare system can keep up with an aging population.

“What we need is faster turnarounds for patients in hospitals, leading to less waiting time. And also, we want better outcomes,” he said. “What our centre is developing in research is that we are learning from expert surgeons. We are encoding that or packaging that into artificial intelligence models, and we put that on robots that can learn from those learned techniques from experts and replicate that–not autonomously, but in a supervised fashion.”

For Feldman, human interaction between doctor and patient is “always going to be really important.”

“We’re a long, long, long way away from you being operated on by a robot,” she said. “The perspective is not saying, ‘AI is going to replace something,’ but saying, ‘How can AI help surgeons and nurses and clinicians even improve surgery for patients?'”