A looming U.S. surgeon shortage—projected to reach up to 19,900 unfilled positions by 2036 per AAMC data—is set to collide with an aging population and frequently crumbling rural healthcare infrastructure. Rural communities face the sharpest edge of this predicament: 136 rural hospitals closed between 2010–2021, leaving 60% of non-metro counties lacking adequate surgical care in…
24 R&D trends that redefined 2024
In many respects, 2024 was a year of building upon the foundations laid by previous technological and scientific advances. While AI continued to evolve at a rapid clip, progress was in many ways more incremental than last year when GPT-4 redefined expectations for genAI. But AI continues to make definable improvements across a range of…
Four-armed surgical robotics system taps a surgeon’s feet for controls
By Brianna Wessling at The Robot Report Researchers at EPFL, a public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland, have developed a four-armed surgical robotics system that allows surgeons to perform laparoscopic surgeries by controlling two of the robotic arms using haptic foot interfaces. The results were published in The International Journal of Robotics Research. The research was…