The machine complements the work of skilled doctors without replacing them.
Surgical robots that can assist in medical procedures are increasingly gaining traction as they help doctors perform better and allow patients to heal faster.
There’s the famous DaVinci Surgery system that is equipped with highly dexterous robot arms that can be manipulated to complete precise cutting and stitching. In the UK, robots are helping thousands of women plagued by the painful womb condition endometriosis while in Canada robot-assisted deep brain stimulation surgeries are aiding patients suffering from epilepsy.
Artificial Intelligence makes art, knows more than many humans and works faster than they do. But will people accept AI-controlled social robots working in the service industry or entertaining those in need of care?
What does a robot need to have to be accepted as a social partner by a human being? Does it need a face? Should the machine understand — or even show — emotions?
The psychologist, neurologist and philosopher Agnieszka Wykowska, currently researching at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, says: “We tend to humanize everything. We even see faces in car hoods. This is further reinforced whenever a robot demonstrates humanlike behavior.
In a care home for the elderly in Rendsburg, the film shows what sort of relationship forms between residents and robots. Hannes Eilers from the Kiel University of Applied Sciences is carrying out tests there with robots for health insurance companies. The robots sing with the elderly people, play games or demonstrate physio exercises. The one thing they’re not allowed to do with them is pray. The systems there function autonomously. This means they can’t access an AI server, so they abide by data protection laws.
But AI servers are already controlling much of our communication. They don’t just suggest what we should read, eat or buy next: ‘chatbots’ also serve as personal contacts. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, the scientist Hossein Rahnama is working on perfecting the appearance and communication skills of chatbots like these. His view: “We now have access to such immense computing power and data that we can create a digital version of every person. Before too long, we can even make them sentient.
In future, will we be able to tell the difference between a flesh-and-blood human, and their digital clone?
One way to put dentists out of the drilling and filling business is to find a way to re-establish and stimulate something our bodies do when our teeth first form. Stem cell researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle may have figured out a potential treatment to repair damaged teeth and regenerate those we lose.
Hai Zhang, a professor of restorative dentistry at the University, along with several colleagues has found a way to generate ameloblasts. What are they? Ameloblasts are one of two cells that exist in human embryos responsible for the formation of our teeth. The other cells are called odontoblasts—the former secrete enamel, the latter dentin.
The process of tooth development is called odontogenesis. The two cells mentioned above are critical to tooth formation. Enamel keeps our teeth surfaces hard and strong throughout our lifetimes. Mineralization of teeth begins early in embryonic development. Dentin precedes enamel production, both critical to giving us a healthy set of choppers.
SINGAPORE, 14 April 2023 – A preclinical study using stem cells to produce progenitor photoreceptor cells—light-detecting cells found in the eye—and then transplanting these into experimental models of damaged retinas has resulted in significant vision recovery. This finding, by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School, the Singapore Eye Research Institute and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, marks a first step towards potentially restoring vision in eye diseases characterised by photoreceptor loss.
Research reveals a promising stem cell approach to correct photoreceptor cell degeneration, which underlies several forms of visual decline and blindness.
Franzova and Shen et al. report that unresponsive patients with cognitive motor dissociation have intact ascending arousal pathways, preserved thalamocortical f.
An experimental procedure was found to improve the vision of patients whose eyes were damaged, according to a new study. NBC News’ Kristen Dahlgren has more on the procedure, which uses stem cells to restore the cornea.
People don’t go into Michael Angelo’s field to be cool.
“Pathology is like the chess club of medicine,” said Angelo MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology at the Stanford School of Medicine. You don’t join for status — you join because you love it, he said.
Still, Angelo got the idea for a pretty cool technology when he was a young pathology resident studying the origins and trajectory of disease.
From marigolds to human babies, most complex organisms start as a single-celled embryo. In his new book, Ben Stanger explores what our humble origins could teach us about health and disease.
