Surgery’s next frontier: AI and autonomous robots

Modern Healthcare – Wednesday, October 29, 2025
By Lauren Dubinsky

Surgical robots have transformed the operating room for doctors, bringing greater precision to procedures and improving patient outcomes.

The next frontier: Robots that can perform procedures entirely on their own.

What once was the stuff of science fiction is starting to become a reality as academic medical centers and research universities collaborate to develop the technology. It may take over a decade for the advancements to reach clinical practice and there would need to be a regulatory framework designed to approve them.

Once approved, autonomous surgical robots could help ease a shortage of surgeons that the Association of American Medical Colleges projects will reach 10,000 to 19,900 doctors by 2036. The robots also have the potential to lower hospital costs by shortening time in surgery, reducing complication rates and standardizing surgical outcomes.

Technology likely to be available more in the near-term includes tools that guide surgeons during a procedure and robots capable of performing routine parts of surgery on their own.

Northwell Health’s use of AI to guides surgeons

Dr. Filippo Filicori, a robotic and minimally invasive surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital, part of New Hyde Park, New York-based Northwell Health, is working on artificial intelligence technologies that guide surgeons through a procedure. The AI alerts surgeons if they are too close to an important organ or tissue or indicate what the next step in the procedure should be.

The AI models are trained on large amounts of annotated surgical video footage that identifies organs, surgical events like incisions and dissections and more. Annotations are time-consuming because they are traditionally done manually.

Filicori is working with AI annotation company Encord, which has a platform that automates the process. The platform can annotate 30 seconds of surgery with one click and it offers tools like Meta’s Segment Anything Model 2, which reduces annotation time by 85% to 90%,Filicori said.

“It’s tough to get surgeons, especially the high-level surgeons, to sit in front of a video and start annotating things,” he said. “And so, streamlining the annotation problem is key for us.”

The technologies also can help train surgeons, analyze performance, optimize workflows and reduce delays. These developments are about two to three years from becoming commercially available, Filicori said.

Johns Hopkins’ robotic gallbladder procedure

Johns Hopkins University announced in July it completed a gallbladder removal on part of a pig using an autonomous robot.

An AI model, called SRT-H, was integrated with the da Vinci research kit Si system to perform the procedure. The research team is collaborating with robotic surgery company Virtual Incision on its Mira surgical robot. Juo-Tung Chen, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins studying mechanical engineering and a member of the team, said the group hopes to integrate their model with that robot.

The model is built with the same machine-learning architecture that powers ChatGPT. It performs the procedure autonomously but can respond to voice commands if a surgeon needs to intervene and it learns from those commands.

The team plans to investigate what other types of surgery could be performed and is looking into using it on live animals.

Johns Hopkins received a three-year, $3.5 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, part of the Health and Human Services Department, in June 2023.

Vanderbilt University and University of Utah’s autonomous robot

Researchers from Vanderbilt University and the University of Utah are developing AI models that integrate with robotic surgery systems, which the team hopes will be able to autonomously remove tumors from the trachea and prostate in about two years.

They are collaborating with robotic surgery company Virtuoso Surgical to integrate the AI models into the company’s robot. The team hopes the research can be applied to uterine fibroids, bladder tumors, spine procedures and brain cysts.

Autonomous robots could open the door for procedures that aren’t currently possible, pushing the boundaries of microsurgery by suturing vessels and nerves smaller than half a millimeter in diameter, said Alan Kuntz, assistant professor in the Kahlert School of Computing and the Robotics Center at the University of Utah.

The robots also can perform parts of a procedure on their own such as holding tissue taut while a surgeon makes a cut, Kuntz said.

In September 2024, the project received $12 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

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