Surgeons must account for patients’ breathing, snoring, and eye movements, along with their own involuntary hand tremors, while they work on a layer of cells less than a millimeter thick. That’s why researchers at the University of Utah’s John A. Moran Eye Center and the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering have collaborated to create a new robotic surgery device that aims to give surgeons “superhuman” hands.

The robot is extremely precise, executing movements as small as one micrometer, or smaller than a single human cell. The robot is also small enough to be mounted directly to the patient’s head using a helmet. Once in place subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) movements of the patient’s head are compensated, keeping the eye quite still from the perspective of the robot. The robot also scales down the surgeon’s movements, measured using a handheld robotic device known as a haptic interface, to the much-smaller surgical site within the eye, compensating for hand tremors along the way.

While still in testing stages, the device aims to improve outcomes for patients and support cutting-edge procedures including the delivery of gene therapies for inherited retinal diseases. The researchers successfully tested the robot using enucleated pig eyes, publishing their results in the journal Science Robotics. The study was led by Jake Abbott, a professor in Price Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Moran Eye Center retinal specialist Paul S. Bernstein, MD, PhD. Coauthors include Abbott lab members Nicholas Posselli, PhD, and Zachary Olson, Moran Eye Center retinal specialist Eileen Hwang, MD, PhD, and Aaron Nagiel, MD, PhD, of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

The retina is home to the light-sensitive rod and cone cells that form the basis of vision. Several inherited disorders cause those cells to form incorrectly, leading to vision impairments of ranging severity, but new gene therapy techniques promise to reverse those conditions. Treatments for vision disorders are rapidly advancing,” Abbott says. “We need to give surgeons better ability to keep up with them. The experiments demonstrated the success rate when using the surgical robot device to be higher than documented manual rates in some studies.

Source: https://www.price.utah.edu/2025/02/19/early-study-shows-promise-for-eye-surgery-robot-invented-at-the-university-of-utah