AI is taking over another job you thought was untouchable: The robot revolution is targeting “human-only” careers

You’ve seen it in futuristic movies, an operating table that can do all sorts of medical procedures without any humans involved. What was once just a sci-fi fantasy is now one step closer to becoming a reality.

A team of researchers at John Hopkins University have demonstrated that an AI-controlled robot can successfully perform a gallbladder removal. It completed the operation on a lifelike patient with “100% accuracy,” even when unexpected complications were introduced, flawlessly adapting to the situation.

“This work represents a major leap”

The researchers trained the AI surgical robot, called SRT-H, with videos of John Hopkins surgeons performing gallbladder operations on pig cadavers. The knowledge that was learned was reinforced with captions describing the tasks.

While the robot was slower in carrying out the surgery, which was a minutes-long procedure that included a series of 17 tasks, it did so with the skill comparable to an expert surgeon. The team’s findings were published in Science Robotics.

“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,” said lead author Ji Woong ‘Brian’ Kim in a statement.

“Our work shows that AI models can be made reliable enough for surgical autonomy—something that once felt far-off but is now demonstrably viable,” added the former postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins who is now with Stanford University.

Medical roboticist Axel Krieger, whose Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, STAR, performed the first autonomous robotic surgery on a live animal in 2022, said that unlike that system, which was highly controlled with a predetermined rigid surgical plan, this new system was like a self-driving car.

“[It] is like teaching a robot to navigate any road, in any condition, responding intelligently to whatever it encounters,” he explained.

The interactive AI system is able to respond to spoken commands and corrections, learning from the feedback that it is given, much like a novice surgeon working with a mentor. “To me it really shows that it’s possible to perform complex surgical procedures autonomously,” Krieger said.

“This is a proof of concept that it’s possible and this imitation learning framework can automate such complex procedure with such a high degree of robustness,” he added.

The researchers are planning to train SRT-H to perform other procedures with the hope of achieving the first fully autonomous surgery where no human intervention is needed.

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