Robotics beyond soft-tissue

July saw the world of surgical robotics descend upon Strasbourg for the annual Society of Robotic Surgery (SRS) congress. Under the leadership of Dr. Vipul Patel, SRS has grown significantly as robotics has become the dominant tool of choice across multiple specialties. The exhibition hall and scientific programme showed that this is now a multi-specialty congress to include orthopaedics, endovascular interventions, incisionless interventions, and even the role of humanoid robots in future operating rooms.

Telesurgery

Telesurgery was the theme for this year’s congress, and SRS has led the efforts to convene relevant stakeholders to help the field navigate the technical, legal, regulatory and ethical issues it presents. Multiple players demonstrated their capabilities in this field. Clearly, we are in the early innings with much to work out outside of the technology. As technologists, issues with latency, jitter and network stability are still front of mind; multiple conversations and talks discussed the need for ADAS-like safety systems enabled by AI.

Advanced visualisation, the early stages of autonomy, and AI

In the soft-tissue space, the story of incumbent and challengers continues to play out around the world. Both corporates and start-ups are competing in terms of form factor, architecture and business models to try and erode Intuitive’s dominance. More interestingly, while this commercial battle plays out, the technologically ambitious are working hard to move the field beyond ‘the robot’ – beyond debates about boom-mounted vs modular, open vs closed – to the next wave of advanced visualisation, the early stages of autonomy and AI.

CC on the podium

The CC digital surgery team was out in force – meeting with clients, partners and clinicians across the exhibition hall, and contributing meaningfully to the scientific programme with three invited talks, spanning AI, surgical education and real-time processing.

AI in surgery: from models to world’s first simulated autonomous surgery

One of the standout sessions was the – at-times standing room only – full day surgical AI track, co-hosted with AI2M and chaired by Drs. Filippo Filicori, Andrew Hung and Vip Patel. The session brought together a who’s who of those at the cutting edge of AI in surgery. Surgeons, academics in data science and researchers from industry shared their perspectives and latest research on physical AI, sub-task autonomy and operating room workflow intelligence.

Joe Corrigan, Head of Technology for CC’s AI & healthcare teams, was invited to present some of the lessons learned in the course of CC’s work in AI in medtech. In recent years, CC has accumulated market-leading experience in AI-enabled Class II&III devices. Joe shared his lessons from the coalface, with some dos and don’ts on how to develop with AI, with a focus on high quality medical data, augmentation through simulation and real-world testing.

Credentialing in a multi-platform world

The surgical education track tackled another pressing question: how do we train and credential surgeons in a multi-platform world? Maureen Halligan, VP Digital Product Innovation at CC, opened the session with a challenge to the status quo, arguing that today’s fragmented and inconsistently applied guidelines no longer reflect the pace of technological development.

Crucially, Maureen made the case for using the robot not just as a surgical tool, but as a data-rich platform – one that can support objective assessment of surgeon performance across tool handling, procedural steps and anatomical knowledge, and potentially shorten surgeon learning curves.

Advanced visualisation and AI-augmented imaging

Surgical visualisation – and its deepening relationship with imaging and real-time processing – was a theme threaded through the entire congress. It culminated in a dedicated Friday session led by Dr. Michael McDonald of AdventHealth Celebration, featuring speakers from Histosonics, NVIDIA and others.

Real-time AI

Joe Smallman, CC’s Technical Lead for AI and Algorithms, presented Omniscia, our next-generation surgical visualisation platform. Built on five years of imaging research and NVIDIA’s Holoscan framework, Omniscia delivers state of the art real-time, AI-enhanced video processing with ultra-low latency and exceptional clarity. It provides 4× resolution enhancement, up to 20dB noise reduction, and latency of just ~12 ms ( <1 frame @60fps).

Unlike generative AI, Omniscia leverages in-scene temporal data for super-resolution, ensuring robust performance even with previously unseen anatomy or tools. This capability generated widespread interest – from improving image quality and automated tool recognition to its potential in capturing objective performance metrics.

CC in surgical robotics

CC remains at the forefront of digital surgery. Our current docket includes real-time AI across devices, digital platform design, world-leading expertise in human-machine interfaces and console design, and novel robotic architectures that can take robotics stability and control into entirely new clinical areas. We are partnering with our clients to build the enabling technologies that will define the next decade of surgical innovation.