Autonomous Robotic Surgery: Will Your Next Surgeon Run on Caffeine or 120V?

ABSTRACT: Robotic assisted surgery (RAS) systems provide enhanced dexterity and precision but still require surgeons to control every motion, leading to long procedures and variable outcomes. While autonomous robotics has revolutionized manufacturing and aviation, soft tissue surgery presents unique challenges including unpredictable deformations and complex perception requirements. My research transforms teleoperated robotic surgery into autonomous systems to improve patient outcomes through increased precision, speed, and reduced human error. This presentation will discuss our novel approaches to autonomous soft tissue surgery, including our robotic system for supervised autonomous laparoscopic anastomosis and our latest work: the hierarchical surgical robot transformer (SRT-H), recently published in Science Robotics, which enables end-to-end learning of complex surgical phases of procedures DR. ALEX KRIEGER is Associate Professor and Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He leads research in autonomous surgical robotics, including the smart tissue autonomous robot (STAR) and language conditioned imitation learning for surgical automation. Professor Krieger is an NSF CAREER award recipient and inventor of over thirty patents licensed to companies including Intuitive Surgical, Siemens, and Philips. Prior to Hopkins, he held positions at University of Maryland and Children's National and worked in industry developing FDA-approved medical devices. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he pioneered an MRI-guided prostate biopsy robot used in over 50 patient procedures. HOSTS: Boyuan Chen, Xianyi Cheng, Joanna D. Bertram