Alaa Eldin Abdelaal | Human Skill Augmentation in Robot-Assisted Surgery

Robot-assisted surgery (RAS) has gained momentum over the last two decades with more than 2,500,000 RAS procedures performed in 2024 alone using the da Vinci Surgical System, the most widely used surgical robotics platform. RAS enables surgical approaches that reduce patient recovery time and make minimally invasive surgery more accessible and comfortable for physicians. Yet for all the advances it has brought, RAS basically replicates open surgery, through smaller incisions, ignoring many of the robot’s unique capabilities. For example, robots can have more than one pair of “eyes,”  they can have more than two arms, and they can operate in two or more different locations at the same time. In this talk, Dr. Abdelaal will present examples of how leveraging these unique capabilities can augment humans’ skills as they use these systems, towards achieving superhuman performance.