Abu Dhabi AI system wins European prize for guiding robotic surgeons

Summary

• A team led by MBZUAI won first prize at Europe's robotic urology innovation challenge.
• Janus AI matches live operating-room video to 30-second clips of past comparable surgeries.
• Researchers say the tool could train residents and reach clinical use.

The latest

An AI system that pulls up video of past robotic operations while a surgeon is still operating took first prize at the Robotic Urology Breakthrough Innovation Challenge, held at ERUS26, Europe's largest robotic urology meeting. The winning system, Janus AI, was built by a team led by researchers from the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi, according to MBZUAI.

Details

• How it works: According to MBZUAI, Janus AI is a video-to-video retrieval system. It takes footage captured live in the operating room and matches it against a stored library of 30-second clips drawn from similar past procedures, returning reference material to the surgeon while the operation is under way.
• The speed problem: Features from every clip in the library are extracted by a neural network and precomputed in advance, so only the current surgery's footage has to be processed live. The similarity search runs in RAM and typically takes milliseconds, according to the university.
• Beyond the clip: Surgeons are not limited to the matched 30-second segment. MBZUAI said they can keep watching the full-length reference video to see how the rest of a comparable procedure unfolded, rather than only the moment that triggered the match.
• The teaching case: The researchers said Janus AI could serve as an educational tool for residents and less experienced surgeons. Cesare Stefanini, Professor of Robotics at MBZUAI, said a library restricted to the strongest operations means a junior surgeon only ever sees "the best of the best."
• Who built it: The project is a collaboration between MBZUAI, the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Turin. MBZUAI named Edoardo Fazzari, a postdoctoral researcher at the university, as the main contributor, working under Stefanini's supervision.
• The clinical partners: The team also included Simone Crivellaro, Luca Morgantini and Chiara Gumiero from the Department of Urology at the University of Illinois Chicago, alongside Alberto Vignola of the University of Turin's Medical School, according to MBZUAI.
• The venue: The award was handed out at ERUS26, described by MBZUAI as Europe's largest meeting on robotic urology. The competition, RUBIC, is positioned around breakthrough innovation in the field, and Janus AI placed first.
• What comes next: MBZUAI said future work will expand the video library with hundreds of additional surgical videos, bring graduate students into development and validation, and move the system toward clinical translation. No timetable for clinical deployment was announced.

Between the lines

The design choice that makes Janus AI usable is also its main constraint: because every library clip is precomputed, the system's value rises or falls with how many high-quality operations sit in that library. That is precisely why the stated next step is adding hundreds more videos — and why the curation standard Stefanini describes, limiting references to the strongest surgeries, becomes an editorial decision as much as a technical one.

What's next

Watch for the expanded video library, the validation work involving graduate students, and any announcement moving Janus AI from competition prototype toward use inside an operating room.

Source: MBZUAI