Medtronic launches Touch Surgery AI platform for the operating room and digital surgery

Medtronic has unveiled an AI platform for the operating room built on its Touch Surgery ecosystem. The system combines three stages of surgery: preparation and training before the operation, remote mentoring during it, and analytics afterward. Medtronic has been developing this line of work since 2020, when it acquired Digital Surgery, the British startup that created Touch Surgery.

What is Touch Surgery

Touch Surgery is Medtronic's digital surgery ecosystem, which ties the entire course of an operation into a single data flow. The platform works at three stages, each with its own job.

• Before surgery — planning the procedure and training surgeons on simulations
• During surgery — telementoring and teleproctoring: a remote specialist watches the operation as it unfolds and advises the operating surgeon
• After surgery — analytics of the procedure recording: reviewing the surgeon's actions and learning from real cases

Medtronic got the core of the ecosystem with Digital Surgery, the British startup it acquired in 2020. According to The Robot Report, the essence of the current announcement is linking these three phases into one computing platform right in the operating room.

"Touch

Surgery unites preoperative planning and training, intraoperative telementoring and teleproctoring, and postoperative analytics," — The Robot Report.

Why the operating room needs a computing platform

Medtronic is placing compute next to the surgeon so that video and surgical data are processed on site, not only in a remote cloud. This matters for live surgery: the video stream of a procedure is sensitive to latency and to patient privacy, and keeping its processing close to the operating table is safer and faster.

Teleproctoring is the platform's key use case. An experienced surgeon in another city or country joins the operation remotely, sees the same picture as the operating team, and guides a less experienced colleague in real time. This widens access to complex techniques where the right specialist is physically absent, and it reduces the need to fly experts between clinics.

The postoperative stage is geared toward training. Every procedure is recorded and turned into review material: the platform helps show where the team performed optimally and where it did not, and carries those lessons over to subsequent operations.

Part of a bigger bet on robotic surgery

Touch Surgery is not a standalone product but part of Medtronic's broader digital ecosystem around surgery. Alongside it, the company is pushing its Hugo RAS robotic platform, which it positions as a competitor to the da Vinci system from Intuitive Surgical, the longtime leader in the surgical robot market.

Medtronic's logic is simple: connect robots, instruments and surgical data into one loop, where AI works not as a separate gadget but as an end-to-end layer, from planning to review of results. A computing platform in the operating room is the foundation on which video analytics and in-procedure guidance can later be built.

What this means

AI is entering the operating room not as a "smart scalpel" but as a layer of data and connectivity: the platform records every operation, lets teams learn from recordings, and connects remote experts to a live procedure. For medtech, this is a step from standalone devices toward an ecosystem where the value lies in data about the operations themselves.