Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. Eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used AI tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini.
The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors, but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation.
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