Artificial intelligence performs surgery

MADRID (EFE).— A robot trained with artificial intelligence completed part of a gallbladder removal operation without human assistance, with a 100% accuracy level, reported researchers from Johns Hopkins University in an article published in “Science Robotics.”

Although the procedure was performed on ex vivo porcine tissue models, scientists hailed the experiment as a “transformative breakthrough” in the field of robotic surgery.

The machine responded to verbal instructions from the medical team, adapting in real time just as a resident doctor in training would with his mentor.

“This advancement takes us from robots that can perform specific surgical tasks to those that truly understand surgical procedures,” explained Axel Krieger, lead author of the study.

According to the team, the system, called SRT-H, is an evolution of the STAR model, which in 2022 performed autonomous laparoscopic surgery but in a rigid and controlled environment.

SRT-H can make decisions on the fly, self-correct, and adapt to individual anatomical characteristics. “Our work demonstrates that AI models can be reliable enough for surgical autonomy,” said Ji Woong “Brian” Kim, another of the authors and currently a researcher at Stanford.

Built on the same machine learning architecture that powers ChatGPT, the robot learns by watching videos of real surgeries, accompanied by explanatory subtitles.

In the case of the gallbladder operation, it learned 17 key steps using this method before reproducing them on its own with high precision. “To me, this really demonstrates that it's possible to perform complex surgical procedures autonomously,” Krieger said. The team validated the system's effectiveness by performing multiple cholecystectomies on eight porcine tissues.

Although the process was slower than that of a human, the results were similar to those of an expert.