Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed an AI-powered surgical robot that can autonomously perform critical steps of gallbladder removal surgery (cholecystectomy). Built on the widely used Da Vinci surgical platform and trained through language-guided imitation learning, the system was exposed to more than 17 hours of surgical video, motion data, and natural language annotations, enabling it to accurately clip and cut ducts and vessels. In testing, the robot achieved 100% accuracy while operating on pig cadaver gallbladders and livers, though at a slower pace than human surgeons.
Unlike existing systems that require full surgeon control, this AI-driven model can adapt to complications and even respond to simple verbal feedback such as “move left” or “place the clip higher.” Researchers likened its training process to that of mentoring a surgical trainee. The team…
