A Robot Could Be Assisting Your Next Surgery

The AI revolution is already changing how doctors perform operations in hospitals around the country

Sari Harrar,

AARP

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Published September 29, 2025

illustration of doctor performing surgery

Glenn Harvey

Matt McLeod’s lower back hurt. He lost feeling in his left leg. Then the longtime general manager of a Lansing, Michigan, menswear store noticed something really odd: His coats had gotten too long.

“I was losing so much height,” says McLeod, 65, of nearby Okemos, Michigan. “I went from 5-foot-10 to 5-foot-7.”

In December 2024, Frank Phillips, M.D., a professor of spine deformities at Rush Medical College in Chicago, repaired McLeod’s discs, freed up squeezed nerves and straightened his curving backbone while wearing an AI-enabled headset that showed him detailed images of McLeod’s spine — helping the surgeon perform the procedures through small incisions and attaching screws to bones at precise angles.

“I see a perfect 3-D view of the spine,” Phillips says. “It’s like I’m looking at the spine for real.”

The headset is part of the augmented reality Xvision Spine System from medical device maker Augmedics. The FDA cleared the latest model in March 2025, allowing “surgeons to see patients’ anatomy as if they have X-ray vision,” says the company. It also shows surgeons the insertion points for screws, with guides for optimal angles.

The futuristic headset is one of a handful of AI-informed surgical tools quietly arriving in U.S. operating rooms; they include cameras, measuring tools and devices that track blood loss and oxygen levels during surgery. Often, patients undergoing surgery don’t even notice how these AI tools are being used, notes Phillips.

Advances like Xvision are the first wave; we could one day see AI-trained robots assisting surgeons with basic jobs like pulling back skin or suctioning a surgical site, says Axel Krieger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

In lab studies, Krieger and his team have taught AI-trained robots to suture together sections of a pig intestine. In a study published in July 2025, a robot that watched about 17 hours of gallbladder surgeries successfully performed part of a gallbladder procedure in a lab.

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The project “brings us significantly closer to clinically viable autonomous surgical systems that can work in the messy, unpredictable reality of actual patient care,” Krieger said in a press release.

In the future, he expects surgical robots will function as assistants.

“It’s like AI in cars,” Krieger says. “We haven’t gotten rid of steering wheels, but we have brake assist, lane assist, parking assistance. With robots, we’ll see the same thing — they won’t replace the experience and cognitive abilities of human surgeons.”

Future surgery advances

Track tools during surgery. Tools or sponges get left behind in about 1 in 3,800 surgeries. Mayo Clinic doctors recently used AI to train a computer to recognize these objects. In a recent study, it was accurate 98.5 percent of the time and kept a correct surgical tool count when analyzing video of a real operation.

Find hidden cancer during brain surgery. An experimental tool called FastGlioma checks for residual cancer during brain surgery. In a 2024 study, the tool missed this dangerous, hidden cancer just 3.8 percent of the time, compared to a miss rate of 24 percent without it.

Match heart donors to recipients. Over half of potential donor hearts in the U.S. go unused, sometimes because they aren’t matched fast enough. Now, a surgeon at the Medical University of South Carolina is using artificial intelligence to build a better allocation system.