Surgical robots take step towards fully autonomous operations
An AI system trained on videos of operations successfully guided a robot to carry out gall bladder surgery on a dead pig, with minimal human assistance
By Chris Stokel-Walker
9 July 2025
A surgical robot operating on a dead pig
Juo-Tung Chen/Johns Hopkins University
An AI-powered robot was able to separate the gall bladder from the liver of a dead pig in what researchers claim is the first realistic surgery by a machine with almost no human intervention.
The robot is powered by a two-tier AI system trained on 17 hours of video encompassing 16,000 motions made in operations by human surgeons. When put to work, the first layer of the AI system watches video from an endoscope monitoring the surgery and issues plain-language instructions, such as “clip the second duct”, while the second AI layer turns each instruction into three-dimensional tool motions.
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In all, the gall bladder surgery required 17 separate tasks. The robotic system performed the operation eight times, achieving 100 per cent success in all of the tasks.
“Current surgical robotic technology has made some procedures less invasive, but complication rates haven’t really dropped from previous laparoscopic [keyhole] surgeries [by human surgeons],” says team member Axel Krieger at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “This made us look into what is the next generation of robotic systems that can help patients and surgeons.”
“The study really highlights the art of the possible with AI and surgical robotics,” says Danail Stoyanov at University College London. “Incredible advances in computer vision for surgical video with the availability of open robotic platforms for research make it possible to demonstrate surgical automation.”
