Surgeons have been using robotics for a long time to complete complicated surgeries. These machines allow the surgeon to have a much greater level of precision, and they can use powerful cameras to get a much better look at things that the doctors can’t access on their own.

There are even surgical robots that doctors can control remotely, allowing hospitals in underserved areas to have access to skilled surgeons.

A team of doctors at Johns Hopkins University has taken this to the next level by successfully allowing a robotic surgeon powered by AI to perform a gallbladder removal procedure entirely on its own. The surgery was done on a hyper-realistic mannequin that had accurate internal organs just to be safe, but the results were very impressive and if it were a human, the surgery would have been a complete success.

The surgical robot had complete autonomy to perform the surgery, respond to any unexpected events, and make all decisions on its own, with the doctors simply observing to see how it did. Lead author and Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Ji Woong Kim talked about the importance of this accomplishment in a statement:

“This work represents a major leap from prior efforts because it tackles some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world.”

The robot AI was trained by showing it videos of human surgeons performing gallbladder removal procedures on dead pigs. It is not clear how many videos the robot, named SRT-H, had to review.

A new paper published in the journal Science Robots, however shows that the training was a great success and gave the AI the information needed to complete this surgery.

In the paper, the researchers say:

“Our method achieves a 100 percent success rate across eight different ex vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention. This work demonstrates step-level autonomy in a surgical procedure, marking a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems.”

The robot is currently operating far more slowly than a human surgeon would, but speeding things along is a relatively easy step when it comes to robotics. Robots have the ability to move at far greater speeds and with much more accuracy than even the most skilled humans.

It is easy to imagine how one day, a robot surgeon could complete a surgery like this in a faction of the time it currently takes and with fewer mistakes.

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