Pig-Organ Trial Suggests AI Robot Surgeons Are Coming

AI-trained robot surgeons have successfully performed complex operations on pig organs without human help—paving the way for fully automated surgery trials on humans within a decade, researchers say. A team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University recounts what the robots managed to achieve in the trial: The robots, trained by watching videos of human surgeons removing gallbladders from deceased pigs, completed eight such removals in roughly five minutes apiece with a 100% success rate, according to a peer-reviewed paper in Science Robotics.

Unlike most current robotic surgeries, which are fully controlled by humans, these robots operated autonomously. They handled 17 steps—cutting the gallbladder from the liver, applying six clips, and removing the organ—and made an average of six corrections per surgery without any human intervention. While human doctors are able to complete the procedure faster, the robots' movements were smoother and more precise, per the paper. "The results were comparable to an expert surgeon," a press release notes.

Per the press release, "The robot performed flawlessly across anatomical conditions that weren't uniform, and during unexpected detours—such as when the researchers changed the robot's starting position and when they added blood-like dyes that changed the appearance of the gallbladder and surrounding tissues." The team hopes to next trial other types of surgeries.

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Axel Krieger of Johns Hopkins calls it a "really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously." While UK robotic surgery expert John McGrath characterized the results as "impressive," he cautioned that we're still a long ways from autonomous surgery becoming viable in a clinical setting. As the Guardian puts it, "tests on dead pig organs do not test the robots' capacity to react to a patient moving and breathing, blood running in the field of operation, an inadvertent injury, smoke from cauterization or fluid on the camera lens."