Study describes robot operating on gall bladder autonomously, 'milestone' in use of AI

Researchers have documented a fully autonomous surgery performed by a robot on gall bladders made of human tissue with 100 per cent accuracy, which they said marked a milestone in deploying these systems in a clinical setting.

In a paper published in the journal 'Science Robotics', the team, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US, said the robot 'SRT-H' was trained on the videos of surgeons operating on dead pigs.

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that systems such as ChatGPT function on, the 'Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy', or SRT-H, also responded to and learned from voice commands from the team while performing the operation -- like a novice surgeon working with a mentor, they added.


"This advancement moves us from robots that can execute specific surgical tasks to robots that truly understand surgical procedures," author and medical roboticist Axel Krieger from Johns Hopkins University said.

"This is a critical distinction that brings us significantly closer to clinically viable autonomous surgical systems that can work in the messy, unpredictable reality of actual patient care," Krieger said.

The team had previously documented a laparoscopic surgery performed by a robot on a pig -- the first autonomous one on a live animal, they said.

However, the robot had required a tissue that was specially marked for surgical intervention, worked in a highly controlled environment and followed a rigid, predetermined surgical plan.

The SRT-H robot truly performs surgery, adapting to individual anatomical features in real-time, making decisions on the fly, and self-correcting when things don't go as expected, the researchers said.

They wrote, "We propose a hierarchical framework for performing dexterous, long-horizon surgical steps.

"Our method achieves a 100 per cent success rate across eight different ex vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention."

The work marks a "milestone towards clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems," they wrote.

They added that while the robot took longer to operate as compared to a human surgeon, results were comparable to an expert surgeon.

Lead author Ji Woong Kim, a former postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said, "This work represents a major leap from prior efforts because it tackles some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world."

"Our work shows that AI models can be made reliable enough for surgical autonomy -- something that once felt far-off but is now demonstrably viable," Kim said.