Abstract

In this workshop, we will focus on frontier challenges and advancements in intelligent robotics for soft tissue surgery. Automating surgical procedures safely is critical to enhance the effectiveness of robotic surgery autonomy to broaden the system’s clinical applicability. Recent advances have pushed forward intelligent perception, decision making, and motion strategies targeting particular surgical tasks. However, challenges remain in soft tissue analysis, situation inference and prediction, active safety awareness, etc., and the demands of real-world surgical environments.

In this workshop, we would like to have discussions on several critical areas:

1. Physics-Informed and Data-Driven Tissue Modeling: Integrating physics-informed neural networks to enable real-time, patient-specific soft tissue deformation modeling and prediction

2. Multimodal Sensing and Situational Awareness: Fusing vision, tactile, and/or force feedback through multimodal foundation models for robust intraoperative tissue tracking and spatial understanding

3. Learning-Based Intelligent Control for Surgery Interaction: Leveraging reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, and online adaptation to handle the uncertainty of soft tissue dynamics in surgical environments

4. Innovative Surgical Robot Design: Designing continuum, soft, and miniaturized robotic platforms purpose-built for safe and dexterous interaction with deformable biological tissues

5. Foundation Models and Decision-Making Autonomy in Surgery: Leveraging vision-language models and surgical foundation models to enhance intraoperative scene understanding and context-aware autonomy

By bringing together experts from diverse fields such as surgical robotic systems, planning and control, machine learning, and clinical practice, this workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and ultimately the advancement of robotic surgery and improved healthcare advances. 

* * *  The arrangement details of the workshop will be announced soon! * * *

* * * See our workshop introduction for last year's (2025) workshop here * * *