Overview

• The Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy system trained on surgical videos with a ChatGPT-style architecture to execute all 17 steps of gallbladder removal without human intervention
• In eight ex vivo operations on pig cadavers, SRT-H achieved a 100 percent success rate in tasks such as identifying ducts, placing clips and severing tissue
• Results were published July 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Robotics by collaborators from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities
• Research teams will next train and test SRT-H on a wider array of procedures to build toward fully autonomous end-to-end surgeries
• Experts warn that challenges including patient movement, bleeding dynamics and regulatory approval mean clinical trials remain several years away