said senior author Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering.RELATED: First wild case of bird flu detected in US in 5 yearsThe STAR has high repetitive motion and precision capability.
Along with high precision imaging for accuracy, researchers say it can adjust to soft-tissue changes in real-time. Soft-tissue can be tricky to operate on — for humans or a robot — because the subtle movements in the texture are unpredictable.
Soft tissue surgery complications such as leakage along the seams occur nearly 20% of the time in colorectal surgery and 25 to 30% of the time in abdominal surgery, researchers said in 2016.
It was then that Johns Hopkins University researchers first proved a robot surgeon could, in fact, adjust to and handle the real-time intricacies of operating on soft tissue.