Medtronic запускает AI-платформу Touch Surgery для операционной и цифровой хирургии

Medtronic unveiled an AI platform for the operating room built on its Touch Surgery ecosystem: the system unites three stages of surgery — preoperative preparation and training, remote mentoring during the operation, and analytics afterward. Medtronic has been developing this direction since 2020, when it acquired the British startup Digital Surgery — the creator of Touch Surgery.

What Touch Surgery Is

Touch Surgery is Medtronic's digital ecosystem for surgery, which links the entire surgical journey into a single data stream. The platform operates across three stages, each solving its own task.

• Before surgery — planning the procedure and training surgeons on simulations
• During surgery — tele-mentoring and tele-proctoring: a remote specialist sees the course of the operation and advises the operating surgeon
• After surgery — analytics of the procedure recording: reviewing actions and learning from real cases

The foundation of the ecosystem came to Medtronic together with the British startup Digital Surgery, which the company acquired in 2020. As The Robot Report reports, the essence of the current announcement is linking these three phases into a single computing platform right in the operating room.

"Touch

Surgery combines preoperative planning and training, intraoperative tele-mentoring and tele-proctoring, and postoperative analytics," — The Robot Report.

Why the Operating Room Needs a Computing Platform

Medtronic is embedding computing next to the surgeon so that video and operation data are processed on site, not only in a remote cloud. For live surgery this matters: the procedure's video stream is sensitive to latency and to patient privacy, and keeping its processing close to the operating table is safer and faster.

Tele-proctoring is a key scenario for the platform. An experienced surgeon from another city or country connects to the operation remotely, sees the same picture as the operating team, and guides a less experienced colleague in real time. This expands access to complex techniques in places where the needed specialist is not physically present, and reduces the need to fly experts between clinics.

The postoperative stage works for training. Every procedure is recorded and turned into material for review: the platform helps identify where the team acted optimally and where it did not, and to carry those conclusions forward to future operations.

Part of a Bigger Bet on Robotic Surgery

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

Medtronic's logic is simple: link robots, instruments, and data about operations into a single loop, where AI works not as a separate gadget but as an end-to-end layer — from planning to reviewing results. The computing platform in the operating room is the foundation on which video analytics and prompts during the procedure can later be layered.

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, allows learning from recordings, and connects remote experts to a live procedure. For medtech, this is a step from standalone devices to an ecosystem where the value lies in the data about the operations themselves.