First Robotic Ultrasound-Guided Nerve Blocks in Humans Using the Magellan System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Ultrasound-guided nerve blocks are becoming a standard of modern anesthesia. We developed a robotic system, Magellan, to perform nerve blocks using a remote control center. METHODS: Thirteen patients were enrolled in this pilot study. The Magellan system consists of 3 main components: a joystick, a robotic arm, and a software control system. The joystick allows simulation of wrist or arm movements of the proceduralist. After localization of the sciatic nerve, 35 mL of bupivacaine 0.25% was injected. The success rate of sciatic nerve blocks and block performance times (performance time=interval of time from the start of the ultrasound search for the nerve to the end of the injection of the drug; robotic time=interval of time from the identification of the nerve to the end of the injection of the drug) were determined. Data are presented as median (25th, 75th; minimal, maximal) and categorical data. RESULTS: Eight men and 5 women aged 34 years were included in this study. Nerve blocks were successful in all patients. A successful attempt was defined as the introduction of the needle into the nerve sheath; motor or sensory block was not used to determine the success rate. The nerve performance time was 189 seconds (150, 233; 90, 305), whereas the robotic time was 164 seconds (121, 210; 73, 271). CONCLUSIONS: We present the first human testing of a robotic ultrasound-guided nerve block system. The success rate was 100%. The total performance time was approximately 3 minutes to 4 minutes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".