The future of surgery just scrubbed in.
In a groundbreaking medical first, robots designed to move and function like humans have performed surgery on a live patient, successfully completing two laparoscopic gallbladder removals.
The breakthrough offers a peek at a future where these advanced machines could help bridge gaps in healthcare — easing surgeon shortages, lending doctors a high-tech hand in the operating room and expanding access to lifesaving procedures in underserved areas.
“This study shows that humanoid robots have a viable future in the field of surgery,” Michael Yip, a faculty member at the University of California San Diego and one of the paper’s senior authors, said in a press release.
“You can imagine these robots being deployed in remote communities where staffing is challenging, or in austere environments like search and rescue scenarios where a massive deployment of field medicine is needed in a short period of time,” he explained.
“This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”
The paper detailed two recent operations that put the technology to the test.
In the first, a humanoid robot took the lead as surgeon with help from a human assistant, while the second involved a duo made up entirely of robots.
During both procedures, the machines successfully performed key surgical tasks — retracting tissue, dissecting, clipping and removing gallbladders from the liver beds of two pigs — marking an important step toward future human trials.
But the robots weren’t operating independently. In each case, trained human surgeons remotely controlled the machines, guiding their movements from a distance.
Notably, Yip and his colleagues didn’t build a custom robot from scratch for the experiment.
Instead, they started with two commercially available Unitree G1 humanoid robots — which stand about 5 feet tall, weigh roughly 60 pounds and cost less than $20,000 — then modified them to handle the same types of instruments used in minimally invasive procedures.
That approach gave the robots a key advantage: unlike specialized robotic systems built for a limited set of tasks, a humanoid robot like the team’s machine, nicknamed “Surgie,” could potentially be adapted for a wider range of jobs both inside and outside the operating room.
The researchers also pointed to the robots’ smaller size, lower cost, and simpler setup as potential benefits compared with traditional robotic systems.
Together, they said those advantages could make the technology easier to bring to rural hospitals, remote communities and other places where medical resources are limited.
“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” said Dr. Shanglei Liu, one of the paper’s senior authors who remotely controlled the robot during the surgery. “So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield and even to space.”
That flexibility could be especially valuable in places where medical resources are limited. More than 80% of the U.S. population lives in areas with shortages of healthcare infrastructure, according to GoodRx, leaving roughly one in three Americans affected by healthcare deserts.
But don’t expect to see a humanoid robot waiting outside the operating room the next time you go under the knife.
The technology is still in its early stages, and the paper notes that “key technical challenges” must be overcome before these robots can be used in human patients.
For one, the robots needed to be recalibrated several times during the procedures, making the operations take far longer than similar surgeries performed with today’s specialized robotic systems.
Liu said that kind of growing pain is common with emerging technologies, but tend to improve over time.
The team is also working to reduce the delay between a surgeon’s movement and the robot’s response, as researchers explore how the technology could to deploy care to patients remotely.
Rather than replacing surgeons, the scientists said a more realistic near-term role for Surgie could be as a surgical assistant, fetching tools, helping prepare equipment or cleaning up after a procedure.
“Many communities struggle with adequate staffing on the surgical team, which means patients are not being treated,” Yip said.
“Our goal is an operating theatre of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team to deliver procedures to those in need, both in traditional hospital settings as well as in non-traditional, field medicine scenarios.”
