ForSight Robotics’ road to performing a fully robotic cataract surgery

Dr. Robert Ang, the study’s principal investigator, performing a post-op patient exam. | Source: ForSight Robotics

Cataracts are currently the world’s leading cause of blindness, and the only way to treat them is with surgery. However, there is a shortage of trained surgeons who can tackle these difficult procedures. ForSight Robotics said robotics and artificial intelligence can ease this burden and make cataract surgeries more accessible.

“When I was starting to do ophthalmic surgery, eye surgery, I noticed a few things. It’s very hard to do those procedures. The movements are very delicate,” Dr. Joseph Nathan, ForSight Robotics’ co-founder, president, and chief medical officer, told The Robot Report . “We don’t have enough surgeons. We have this huge gap between the number of surgeons and the surge in patients.”

ForSight has created the JASPER Platform, formerly known as ORYOM. The company said JASPER assists surgeons with every step of cataract surgeries. It empowers them with advanced imaging, precision, and motion scaling that reduce surgeon fatigue and variability between procedures.

ForSight Robotics said it recently made a significant advancement. In April, JASPER completed a robot-assisted cataract surgery in a human patient. The procedure was performed by Dr. Alexey Rapoport, with Dr. Robert Edward T. Ang of the Asian Eye Institute in Manila serving as principal investigator.

“This is a transformative event that happened because this is the gateway to really accomplishing the vision of standard designing or doing consistent surgery and being able to accommodate many more surgeons,” Nathan said.

ForSight said that JASPER completed the full procedure from start to finish. This is in contrast to previous ophthalmic robotic procedures that only performed partial tasks during cataract surgery.

“We’re not changing anything, and we’re doing the whole procedure — every step from the first incision to the incision closure,” said Nathan. “This really shows that this field can be elevated by robotics.”

While the robot used AI to prevent surgeons from making mistakes, it did not operate autonomously. Instead, it was controlled by a skilled surgeon.

“We worked with many, many surgeons from many different geographies on animal models, artificial models, to really optimize their ability to control the platform and to benefit from the platform,” Nathan explained. “It’s a completely assisted robot that helps in every step, but the surgeon is in full control. The benefit is that the surgeons have different dexterity or manual abilities, and [the robot] makes it more unified and consistent.”