Funding Awarded to Virtuoso Surgical for its Role in Federal AI Project

Virtuoso Surgical Inc. has been granted multi-institution funding from the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) program to advance surgical autonomy.

Awarded specifically to attain “Autonomy at a Less Invasive Scale in Surgery” (ALISS) and enable fully autonomous surgical procedures, the financing provides up to $12 million and is led by Vanderbilt Engineering professor and Virtuoso Surgical Co-Founder/President Robert J. Webster III, Ph.D.

The award brings together robotics and artificial intelligence experts from Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins University, University of Tennessee (Knoxville) and University of Utah. World-renowned expert robotic surgeons from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Johns Hopkins will lead clinical development efforts in the project.

The award supports placement of the Virtuoso Surgical System at three participating research sites, and all artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) development will take place using this platform. The project also creates a team of embedded artificial intelligence/machine learning experts within Virtuoso Surgical to support the university research teams.

“Fully autonomous surgical robots will transform medicine,” Dr. Webster said. “Not only will they make routine procedures safer and more affordable, but they will also address the worldwide shortage of surgeons and expand global access to lifesaving surgeries.”

Related: Virtuoso Surgical Nabs $1.8 Million in SBIR Funding

Virtuoso Surgical is a surgical robotics company co-founded by Webster and Duke Herrell, M.D., professor of Urology and founder of VUMC’s Minimally Invasive Urologic Surgery and Robotics Programs, who now serves as Virtuoso’s CEO. The Virtuoso Surgical System is an ideal platform for developing autonomous surgery facilitated by AI, ML, and computer vision.

The key to the team’s novel approach is demonstration-based learning. “By enabling robots to learn from, and be coached by, human surgeons, we will create brand new machine learning algorithms beyond anything that exists today,” Webster explained. “Surgeons will literally train robots just like they train residents and fellows today. The result will be systems that initially help surgeons be more accurate and efficient, and eventually fully automate surgical procedures.”

By initially having human surgeons teleoperate the Virtuoso Surgical System as the human performs surgery, the robot can “shadow” the human’s decision-making, learning more generalized skills. “Our algorithms are watching the commands the surgeon sends to the robot and what they were looking at through the robot’s camera at the time,” said Alan Kuntz, Ph.D., assistant professor at University of Utah, and one of the key leaders of the artificial intelligence algorithm development.

“By looking at the history of those commands, the algorithms can infer how what the surgeons did changed based on what they saw. The robot can then apply these learned strategies to new surgical decisions that it hasn’t encountered before. We will further enable the robot to understand its own uncertainty, knowing what it doesn’t know,” Kuntz elaborated, “so that it can ask a human surgeon for input, clarification or to take over when it is unsure of how to proceed. That’s a key building block for robust autonomy.”

Within the next three years, the research team plans to demonstrate a robotic surgical device capable of removing tumors from the trachea and prostate without the direct intervention of a surgeon. These will initially be demonstrated in simulated conditions and not on live patients. The team also foresees this research having future application to uterine fibroids, bladder tumors, spine procedures and brain cysts, among other clinical applications in the future.

“Creating a system that can learn from human surgeons—and continue to improve performance—will be a game changer,” Herrell stated. “Our vision is not to replace surgeons, but to vastly expand the work they do to improve patients’ lives and long-term health outcomes.”

The team includes advanced robotics, imaging and artificial intelligence researchers from many of the top surgical robotics and computer science labs in the United States, with 14 doctorates, 22 post graduate researchers, and five surgeon scientists forming the research team.

Virtuoso Surgical has developed a robotic surgery system that radically improves minimally invasive endoscopic surgery. The Virtuoso Surgical system features a pair of instrument delivery arms made of concentric nitinol tubes that mimic a surgeon’s hand motions to offer unprecedented control and dexterity to a full range of endoscopic applications. The system uses patented technology developed by Virtuoso’s founders at Johns Hopkins University and Vanderbilt University with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The Virtuoso Surgical System has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is not for sale in the United States.