Intuitive Announces Vision for an AI-Enabled Future of Surgical Care

Intuitive will outline its vision for how artificial intelligence (AI) can help shape the future of surgical care and address key healthcare challenges at the Society of Robotic Surgery’s (SRS) annual conference in Hollywood, Florida.

Intuitive’s AI vision is grounded in a belief that AI can improve surgical care by reducing variability, improving outcomes, shortening learning curves, and ultimately expanding surgeon reach — while maintaining the highest standards of patient safety and surgeon control. At SRS, Intuitive will outline its structured approach to AI development, grounded in real-world surgical experience and outcomes from a global dataset of more than 20 million da Vinci procedures.

“Healthcare systems around the world are faced with the same challenges: delivering better patient outcomes, lowering the total cost of care, and expanding access — all while supporting care teams and improving patient experience,” said Intuitive CEO Dave Rosa. “Our focus is on developing AI solutions that can address these challenges by helping care teams learn, collaborate, and deliver care more consistently and efficiently.”

The Five Layers: From Data to Supervised Autonomy
Intuitive’s framework builds AI capability progressively across the surgical journey:

1. Good data — capturing rich, standardized surgical information at scale
2. Meaningful insights — translating data into actionable intelligence
3. Intraoperative guidance — real-time support during surgical procedures
4. Augmented dexterity — AI-assisted precision and control
5. Supervised autonomy — AI that extends surgeon capability while preserving surgeon accountability and control
   

“We are building AI as a capability stack that spans the surgical journey — before, during, and after procedures,” said Iman Jeddi, PhD, Senior Vice President and General Manager of da Vinci Platforms at Intuitive. “Each layer builds on the foundation below it, creating a pathway from data and insights to increasingly advanced forms of assistance. Our longer-term vision of supervised autonomy is not about removing the surgeon. It’s about responsibly extending surgeon capability through technology that is grounded in data, rigorously validated, and designed to preserve surgeon control and accountability.” 

Intuitive’s approach to AI is informed by decades of experience and an extensive, growing body of real-world surgical data. More than 20 million procedures have been performed with da Vinci systems globally¹, creating a data foundation that captures meaningful insights with respect to surgical approach, technique, and workflow.

Intuitive researchers have developed a novel surgical AI framework that moves beyond visual recognition to better reflect how surgeons think and make decisions. The work introduces a dataset built from surgical videos that captures not just what is happening in the operating field, but the reasoning behind clinical choices, including risk assessment and next-step planning. Leveraging this dataset, the team developed advanced vision-language and reasoning models capable of answering complex, context-rich questions about surgery. In early testing, these models significantly outperformed general-purpose AI systems on tasks involving surgical understanding, demonstrating the potential to advance more intelligent, context-aware surgical AI.²

Live Telesurgery: A Future Application of Connected Care
While supervised autonomy represents Intuitive’s longer-term vision for how AI may assist surgeons, extending surgical experience beyond a single operating room remains an important challenge today. Intuitive believes telecollaboration technologies can help surgeons learn from one another, provide additional experience to local care teams, and expand access to specialized care. Telesurgery is one example of how those capabilities may evolve in the future.

During SRS, Intuitive will facilitate a live telesurgery demonstration connecting surgeons at two Intuitive facilities — its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and its campus in Atlanta, Georgia — in real time.

• Dr. Doug Stoddard will be at the remote da Vinci 5 surgeon console in Sunnyvale, CA.
• Dr. Andy L. Hawthorne will be present with the da Vinci 5 system in Atlanta, GA.
  

The procedure will be live streamed to the SRS audience, where surgeons will demonstrate da Vinci 5’s remote collaboration and shared-control capabilities on an advanced tissue model designed to replicate live tissue behavior, including Force Feedback that enables both surgeons to feel the forces exerted on the tissue model by the instruments and shared control of advanced instrumentation including stapling, regardless of the distance.

“This demonstration will be a powerful indication of telesurgery’s potential to address real health equity challenges globally — helping health systems extend specialized surgical experience across broad geographies and expand patient access to consistently high-quality care closer to home,” said Dr. Stoddard

The telesurgery software on the da Vinci 5 system used for the demonstration is for demonstration purposes only. The technology is still in development and the safety and effectiveness of the product has not been established. The technology is not currently for sale and cannot be made available or put into service in the U.S or any other geographies at this time.

Dr. Doug Stoddard is director of surgery and robotics at Christus Health in Texas.

Dr. Andy L Hawthorne is a general and trauma surgeon at St. David’s Round Rock Medical CenterRound Rock, TX

The physicians have received compensation from Intuitive for consulting and/or educational services.

Source: Intuitive

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