It is an incredible pleasure to announce the creation of the Cedars-Sinai Center for Autonomous Robotic Surgery. I will serve as founding Director. For 15 years, my team’s work has harnessed AI to quantify surgeon performance and predict patient outcomes. Now we're extending that vision: building surgical robotics with autonomous capabilities that work in tandem with surgeons — augmenting clinical judgment and making surgery safer and more precise. And best of all — I'm not doing this alone. Next post, I'll reveal the co-director building this with me.

I am proud to announce Michael Yip, PhD as my co-Founding Director of the Cedars-Sinai Center for Autonomous Robotic Surgery. Dr. Yip has served as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, Director of the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab), and Director of the Healthcare and Medical Robotics Collaboratory at the UCSD Contextual Robotics Institute. He has been an internationally recognized innovator and thought leader in surgical robotics for over a decade. Dr. Yip is currently supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, DARPA, and ARPA-H in the areas of surgical robotics and autonomy. He has received numerous best paper awards at top robotics and AI conferences and was recognized with the NSF CAREER award, the NIH Trailblazer award, and as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He was named Faculty Innovator of the Year at UC San Diego in 2024 and elected a Senior Member of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors. His research has also led to the founding of several robotics startups. Together with Dr. Yip, we will build at Cedars-Sinai on the very best of surgical data science and robotics — a world-class research center that delivers responsible, surgeon-driven autonomous robotics to the operating room. I cannot think of a better partner in building this new Center. Welcome, Mike! autonomous-surgery.ai

Another original work from our group, this time taking surgical gestures to the next level. We know that gestures - the moment-to-moment decisions a surgeon makes to complete as task - can help us predict surgical outcomes. But the process of annotating gestures manually takes forever. Introducing "End to end AI system for surgical gesture sequence recognition and clinical outcome prediction" now published in @npjDigitalMed Open access: rdcu.be/fraln Our pipeline to take raw surgical videos to then predict frame by frame gestures, and then predict patient outcomes 12 months after surgery. This is a decade of work - funded through @theNCI and in partnership with @alvincgoh @MSKCancerCenter, @geoffsonn @StanfordUrology , and Christian Wagner @UrologyGronau. Led by Xi Li at @CedarsSinai Department of Computational Biomedicine.

I am in London for a variety of functions this week, but of greatest personal significance is to honor my friend and mentor @prokarurol. Prokar taught me that single individuals can impact whole careers of others. @AmerUrological @Uroweb