Semi-Autonomous Robotic Assistance for Gallbladder Retraction in Surgery accepted to RA-L

Created on June 07, 2025

2025

Our paper “Semi-Autonomous Robotic Assistance for Gallbladder Retraction in Surgery” (, ) has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

In this work, we introduce a semi-autonomous robotic assistance system for minimally invasive surgery that combines domain knowledge-informed feature extraction with neural and probabilistic modeling to improve both the effectiveness and interpretability of robot behavior during gallbladder retraction tasks.

Blog post:

Authors: Alexander Schüßler1, Christian Kunz2, Rayan Younis3, Benjamin Alt4, Jamie Paik1, Martin Wagner3, Franziska Mathis-Ullrich2

  1. Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland ↩ ↩2

  2. Surgical Planning and Robotic Cognition Laboratory, Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany ↩ ↩2

  3. Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus & Center for the Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI), Technische Universität Dresden, Germany ↩ ↩2

  4. AICOR Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, Germany ↩