Nanjing student builds acupuncture robot: can automatically select points, positioning, painless into the needle
When Tencent vice president, Tencent Artificial Intelligence Laboratory AI Lab dean Yao Xing revealed his AI (Artificial Intelligence) ambitions at a TEDx speech in October 2016, he wanted to build a warm "Great White" for everyone. "When a student at Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine revealed his AI ambitions in a TEDx talk in October 2016 that he wanted to build a warm "Dabai" for everyone, a student at Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine had already begun his "Dabai" journey - hoping to build an acupuncture robot that would automatically select and locate acupoints, as well as painlessly insert needles.
Can we make a Dabai that can do acupuncture and solve the problems of manual acupuncture?
Influenced by his father, who is an acupuncturist, Xu Tiancheng has been obsessed with the mysterious science of acupuncture since he was a child. He searched the Internet and found that there was very little public information about acupuncture robots at home and abroad, except for a report in 2011 that a production line would be built in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, with an annual output of 100,000 units of the Chinese "Huang Fu Quiet" acupuncture robot that can do acupuncture on its own - a robot named after the Eastern Han Dynasty doctor who used it for his own medical treatment. The robot's name comes from the Eastern Han Dynasty medical doctor Huang Fu Quieshi, who wrote China's first monograph on acupuncture and moxibustion, "Acupuncture and Moxibustion A Yi Jing", was later honored as the "originator of acupuncture and moxibustion".
But since then, there has been no public news.
The field of acupuncture robots is nearly empty, Xu Tiancheng decided to do it himself. But the first problem is that the acupuncturist still need to go through a lot of point positioning, how can the robot to do accurate and automatic point taking?
Xu Tiancheng said to the surging news (www.thepaper.cn), the human body has its own differences, but the acupuncture points are fixed according to the proportion of the human body distribution, "such as clinically commonly used 'Hegu' point, which is positioned in the back of the hand between the 1st and 2nd metacarpal bone, the second metacarpal bone radial side of the midpoint. at the midpoint of the radial side of the second metacarpal bone. It doesn't matter if you are tall, short, fat or thin, your Hegu point is at the midpoint." Therefore, by building an accurate model, you can solve the problem of "acupoint localization" for the majority of people.
Based on this thinking, he boldly combined the traditional meridian acupoints with modern scientific and civilization achievements -- Chaos Theory and Fractal Theory, and sketched a "digital meridian map". Fractal theory proves the isometric scaling nature of the meridians, and different from the previous scalar map, the digital meridian map is a vector map, which means that the use of optical equipment to locate the acupoints in the human body, will not be caused by the distortion caused by the scaling of the localization of the existence of large errors.
Tiancheng Xu believes that the human body is a chaotic system that appears to be disorganized, but actually contains order. As a butterfly flapping its wings in South America will cause hurricanes in Florida, a single point in the human body can also play a regulatory role in the whole body through the meridian circulation. The path of the meridians seems to be irregular, but the fractal theory of irregular geometric forms as the object of study can be abstracted for the general law, that is, the meridian circulation in the structure and function have self-similar fractal properties. For example, the structure conforms to the "branch growth" pattern -- the trunk bifurcates into branches, the branches bifurcate into smaller, thinner branches, and the leaves on the thinner branches repeat the branch pattern in the pattern of the leaf veins.
"The robot will measure a person's height and sebum thickness before working, measure the position of the acupuncture points to place the needle, and the accuracy of the measurement can be as precise as 0.34 millimeters. There will also be ultrasound sensors on the robot to avoid zapping too deep, while controlling the speed and lifting of the zapping." Xu Tiancheng said.
And the meridian instrument embodies artificial intelligence. Xu Tiancheng team according to "acupuncture acupuncture points" national textbook provides the standard, to the robot input a large number of symptoms, the robot and then with a strong analytical ability to give the acupuncture program, through the robot as a big data platform, can be standardized collection of acupuncture clinical data and ultimately feed back into the clinic, "the ultimate realization of the doctor from a long time of repetitive acupuncture, the doctor will not be a long time of repetitive acupuncture, but will be the most important thing to do. The ultimate realization of the doctor from the long hours of repetitive labor to free, more focused on the treatment plan."
According to Xu Tiancheng, the robot has been able to design 27,000 sets of acupuncture combinations based on symptoms, "like indigestion, sports injuries and other conditions, this robot has been able to perform acupuncture." . But he also admitted that some critical and potentially life-safety points, such as the large vertebrae point and the fixed wheezing point, can't be acupunctured by the robot for the time being.
In Xu Tiancheng's view, the successful development of acupuncture robots is of greater significance in promoting the standardization of acupuncture and the development of acupuncture research. "Scientific research is often hampered by problems such as excessive stimulation caused by human hands applying acupuncture operations on animals, acupuncture robots can improve the quality of acupuncture scientific research on the basis of simulating human hands, avoiding problems such as excessive stimulation caused by the spatial order of magnitude difference between human experimenters applying needles and the recipient animals."
Furthermore, acupuncture can be used not only for human beings, but also for animals such as cows and pigs, as well as household pets such as cats and dogs, which have acupoints, and based on the theory of digital meridians can be used to formulate the standard of needling for animals and to guide robots to perform acupuncture on animals, which is one of the markets that acupuncture has failed to develop at the moment.
However, like the vast majority of domestic medical robotics companies, the medical industry for the robot's requirements are considered a higher level. To really achieve clinical applications and industrialization, these robots still need a lot of clinical trials.
While there have been 50 (including team members) of the school students volunteered to test, but now this acupuncture robot to do, or have to get out of school, seek the power of the business world.