Right now, the best Doogie Howser-bot around still requires a surgeon to actually go through motions of surgery, making them suffer hand cramps and light perspiration, when they could be sipping lattes or curing cancer. Well, researchers at the Imperial College London are upgrading the Da Vinci surgery robot so operating docs can control it with their eyes.

For now, the new software tracks the surgeons' eye movements and builds a 3D map of the tissue they're eyeballin'. That image is stabilized and easy for the doc to work with, even though the robot's instruments are in fact moving along with whatever organ they're toying around inside.

The other cyber-surgeon craziness they're cooking up is a virtual overlay that makes tissue see-through: It models what's underneath it, like a tumor, and gives the doctor high-res Ghost in the Shell vision. So, how long before you swallow nanobot pills that'll patch up your heart automatically and then you poop 'em out? [The Guardian]

Tags: robots | surgery