Surgeons just used robots that look like humans to perform surgery for the first time

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 th...