AI Robot Masters Surgical Tasks

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins University just achieved a breakthrough in surgical robotics

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University just achieved a breakthrough in surgical robotics, training a robot to perform complex medical procedures solely by having it watch videos of human surgeons at work.

The details:

  • The da Vinci Surgical System robot learned and performed critical surgical tasks, such as needle manipulation, tissue lifting, and suturing, with human-level skill.

  • Using a new imitation learning approach, the system trained with hundreds of surgical videos captured by da Vinci robot wrist cameras.

  • The AI model combines ChatGPT-style architecture with kinematics, essentially teaching the robot to “speak surgery” through mathematical movements.

  • The system also showed unexpected adaptability, like automatically retrieving dropped needles — a skill it wasn’t explicitly programmed to perform.

Why it matters: The surge in robotic capabilities for both training and dexterity is opening up new use cases — and surgery is next on the list. This video learning approach could do for surgical robotics what LLMs did for AI, allowing robots to rapidly learn and adapt to any procedure instead of hand-coding for each individual movement.
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