AI- trained robot completes groundbreaking gall bladder operation with 100% success: ‘The future is bright’

An AI-powered robot has completed a groundbreaking surgical procedure, potentially changing the future of medicine forever.

The bot successfully separated the gall bladder from the liver of a dead pig, with experts now exclaiming that automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade.

“The future is bright – and tantalisingly close,” Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, a Medical Robotics professor at Imperial College London, told New Scientist.

Until now, surgical interventions involving AI have largely focused on simple task automation.

This gall bladder operation was far more complex, with the robot surgeon — powered by a two-tier AI system — trained on 17 hours of video encompassing 16,000 motions.

The first AI layer watched the video footage and subsequently created plain-language instructions.

The second AI layer then turned each instruction into three-dimensional tool motions so that the bot could complete the operation.

The robotic system achieved 100 per cent success in all of the tasks.

To make sure it wasn’t just a fluke, the bot performed the same operation seven more times. Each time, the 100 per cent success rate remained

A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore led the AI experiment.

“This made us look into what is the next generation of robotic systems that can help patients and surgeons,” Axel Krieger from Johns Hopkins told The New Scientist.

However, human surgeons shouldn’t worry about becoming obsolete just yet.

During the surgery, the AI bot had to self-correct multiple times.

“There were a lot of instances where it had to self-correct, but this was all fully autonomous,” Krieger explained. “It would correctly identify the initial mistake and then fix itself.”

Further, the robot also had to ask a human to switch out one of its surgical instruments for another, meaning the operation was not entirely automated.

While The Guardian cites experts as saying that robot surgery on humans could be trialled within a decade, Krieger says the next step would be to let the robot operate autonomously on a live animal, “where breathing and bleeding could complicate things.”