Future of Surgery with Intelligent Autonomy: AI for Surgical Training, Robotic Interventions, and Image Guidance

Artificial intelligence is reshaping surgery by enabling systems that can perceive, interpret, and assist within complex clinical environments. In this talk, I will present our work and vision toward intelligent autonomy in surgery across three connected domains: surgical training, robotic intervention, and image-guided surgery. Our research develops AI methods for workflow understanding, skill assessment, and immersive training platforms, while also advancing context-aware robotic assistance through multimodal sensing, learning from expert behavior, and adaptive control in minimally invasive and soft robotic systems. In parallel, we integrate AI with tracking, registration, navigation, and mixed reality to improve anatomical understanding, intraoperative guidance, and procedural accuracy. Across these areas, a central goal is to build surgical systems that move beyond passive tools toward intelligent partners that fuse vision, imaging, kinematics, and sensor data into actionable real-time support, opening new possibilities for safer, more precise, and more scalable surgical care.

Amir Hooshiar is Assistant Professor of Surgery at McGill University and Director of the Surgical Performance Enhancement and Robotics Centre (SuPER). He is a biomedical engineer and roboticist whose research focuses on surgical AI, robotic intervention, mixed reality, and image-guided surgery. His work spans surgical education, intelligent robotic systems, and real-time intraoperative guidance, with the goal of advancing safer, more precise, and more scalable surgical care. At SuPER he has multiple translational research initiatives underway at the interface of engineering and medicine, advanced two FDA approved products from his lab ecosystem and has contributed to more than 10 patent filings in the past year alone. He is the winner of the 2018 NSERC Gilles Brassard Prize for Interdisciplinary Research and the 2025 Prix Hippocrate for the development of the Transformative Digital Health Technology of the Year.