9 Jul 2025

Robot performs gallbladder removal steps autonomously on eight ex vivo specimens

AI and autonomous agentsRobotics and artificial musclesMedical technology and bioelectronics
AI illustration · Illustrative scene, not a photograph of the specific device or experiment.

What was demonstrated

A hierarchical control framework (SRT-H) combined a high-level planner that issues task and corrective instructions in natural language with a low-level policy that generates robot trajectories, trained by imitation learning. In ex vivo cholecystectomy experiments it completed the targeted procedure steps with a 100% success rate across eight gallbladders, without human intervention.

Why it matters

Earlier autonomous surgery work mostly automated short tasks in controlled settings. This shows step-level autonomy over a long, dexterous procedure with recovery from errors.

Caveats

  • Tested only on ex vivo tissue; no live animal or human surgery was performed.
  • Sample size is eight specimens.
  • Ex vivo set-ups lack bleeding, breathing motion and other complications of live surgery.

Technology profiles

Sources

  1. peer reviewed paper
    SRT-H: A hierarchical framework for autonomous surgery via language-conditioned imitation learning
    Ji Woong (Brian) Kim, Juo-Tung Chen, Pascal Hansen et al.. Science Robotics, 9 Jul 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt5254.

Last reviewed 20 Oct 2026.