Editorial: Advances in modern intelligent surgery: from computer-aided diagnosis to medical robotics

Abstract

Medical robots enable accurate, safe and minimally invasive treatments of patients in modern operating rooms, through surgical navigation that spans the entire surgical flow, encompassing the pre-operative surgical planning, intraoperative guidance, and postoperative evaluation (Ciuti et al., 2025;Li et al. 2024). Researchers have investigated all relevant aspects towards this goal (Zhang et al., 2024;Min et al. 2021;Min et., 2023). In addition, deep-learning techniques have recently demonstrated good performances for various tasks in the intelligent surgical/medical robotic systems, including medical image segmentation (Min et al., 2024a), computer-assisted diagnosis (Yan et al., 2025), medical image registration (Du et al., 2024;Zhang et al., 2024), surgical instrument segmentation, surgical step recognition, etc.In this Research Topic, we aim to present the latest developments and advances in the intelligent modern surgical system, including computer-assisted diagnosis, surgical navigation and medical robotics. As a result of the call for participation, five papers were finally accepted and collected in this Research Topic. The articles collected in this Research Topic provide good demonstrations of how medical imaging and intelligent algorithms could benefit the surgical robotic systems and surgical procedures at the end of the day. Despite the achieved significant progress, several challenges still remain in the on-going research development of intelligent surgical robotic systems. For example, to enable accurate navigation and further robot control for robot-assisted soft-tissue surgery, the real-time deformation of soft tissues need to be accurately modelled and the deformable registration between the preoperative and intraoperative spaces is needed (Min et., 2024b).