Gastroenterology has become primed for innovation in AI, robotics and other surgical tech as providers and researchers look for new ways to catch up to the growing demand for GI services.
And when it comes to GI surgery, specifically, the new era of technology promises to not only enhance existing techniques and procedures, but to transform the specialty entirely.
“We’re at a very exciting time,” Thomas Shin, MD, PhD, a physician-scientist and minimally invasive GI and bariatric surgeon at Charlottesville-based University of Virginia told Becker’s. “When we talk about GI surgery, the [1980s] kind of brought in the laparoscopy era [and] minimally invasive surgery. We spent the better half of the last 30 years refining that as a skill set. But now with technological advancements, we have things like a surgical robot and it’s the first time that we are able to go from analog to digital in terms of surgery.”
Cosmo Pharmaceuticals, for instance, launched a study in July 2025 to determine the viability of connecting Medtronic’s GI Genius endoscopy module with Apple Vision Pro.
“They converted the Apple Vision Pro into the clinical cockpit of endoscopy,” Irving Waxman, MD, James R. Lowenstine professor and chief of the division of digestive diseases and nutrition at Rush University in Chicago told Becker’s. Dr. Waxman led the study, which tested the software’s compatibility with three Rush hospitals and one ASC.
The technology not only improves adenoma and polyp detection rates, but also allows the endoscopist to annotate their procedures in real-time.
Similar technologies allow surgeons to receive live feedback from colleagues during a procedure, shifting the way that GI surgeons will be trained in the future. Dr. Shin described this as a shift away from an apprenticeship model, which has traditionally focused on the “gestalt” of surgery, or the perfection of specific forms and results without a true quantification of what a perfectly executed procedure looks like in real time.
“But now with digital surgery we’re able to objectively deconstruct a lot of the mysterious aspects of the gestalt into quantifiable, objective metrics,” Dr. Shin said.”And that has profound implications. My lab is really interested in understanding how we can translate that language, decode surgery, and then objectively tie that to post-operative outcomes or skill acquisition, or, you know, learning curves for trainees, etc.”
He added that this new era of GI surgery could be a powerful tool in battling health equity issues as these technologies become more widespread and available in rural areas.
“Just because you are in the middle of a very rural area with no access to a high-volume surgeon doesn’t mean you should have an ‘inferior surgery,'” Dr. Shin said. “Once we are able to define a surgical procedure down to its very barebone parts, we can start talking the same language, [i.e.], ‘When you do this surgery, it should be done this way’ versus not. And then on the digital platform, we have telepresence, like teleconferencing, and we have the ability to dial into another surgeon’s operation if needed, remotely.”
He likens this to the democratization of information with AI in the way that it completely circumnavigates issues that once stifled progress in surgical innovation.
“if I’m operating and my partner, who has 30 years experience on me, happens to take vacation, I’m on call, and I’m in a bind in the operating room, and I need someone’s help and advice … that patient doesn’t have to suffer because my partner is in Paris sipping coffee,” he said. “I can literally just ask him to teleconference into the operating room and help me guide me on the next step.”
Beyond that, the new class of AI-empowered technologies has even more potential to improve surgical workflows and bring a never-before-seen level of efficiency to ASCs and other practices — which may also improve access, in the long run.
“I think the operations around a surgical center is also a massive opportunity, and I see that as being more of the relatively lower hanging fruit in terms of ways to apply AI technology in this setting and how it affects ASCs,” he said. “These technologies can definitely help us optimize scheduling. That’s something that we are doing in our lab as well: Using machine learning models to leverage chance, using chance constraints and trying to figure out what the optimal or efficiency utilization pattern is; how to schedule things all the way to like; what the perfect anesthesiologist, surgeon, scrub tech combo is that’s going to yield, the highest level of efficiency and turnover. So I think those are the opportunities that I see a lot of companies looking at in real time.”
