Robotic Automation for Surgery

The paradigm shift in surgery towards progressively more minimally invasive approach in the past three decades represents significantly underappreciated transition and opportunity from analogue to a digital era. Despite the concerted efforts in robotic-assisted surgery over the last two decades, less than 10% of the overall soft tissue surgery in the USA and less than 0.5% of all surgery globally are currently performed using surgical robots today. Although cost and utilization are often cited as the major challenge to a broader adoption of the technology, a new paradigm of surgical vision and intelligence driving automation and autonomy, initially at subtask and then task levels but eventually at systems level, is necessary and promises an enhanced adoption of the technology with measurable metrics on improved outcome, safety and accessibility. The goal of these inevitable changes should be viewed not just an ancillary technology that extends the human surgeon’s ability to approved level of competency to practice clinically but potentially an enabling technology beyond human dexterity into a digital intelligence that could potentially expand surgeon’s capacity and capability to a level of digitally accessible proficiency.