Ronney Abaza, MD, discusses the next wave of advancements in robotic surgery

At the 2025 LUGPA Annual Meeting, Ronney Abaza, MD, sat down with Urology Times® to highlight the advances on the horizon in robotic surgery. He specifically pointed to the role of AI in robotic surgery, which he says is progressing on an exponential scale.

“If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have said it's not going to happen in my career. I don't think there will ever be an AI robot that will do the entire operation in my career. If you asked me today, I would tell you it's probably going to happen the next 5 years,” he said.

Abaza is a urologist at Central Ohio Urology Group in Columbus, Ohio.

During the discussion, Abaza also pointed to other notable advances in robotic surgery, such a telesurgery, which allows a surgeon to operate on a patient in another part of the world. He also highlighted other potential innovations such as the application of fluorescence technology that can help surgeons delineate between cancer and non-cancerous tissue, or X-ray vision during the procedure, which can build on 3D vision.

Overall, Abaza noted that while it’s going to take some time for society as a whole to get used to the idea of AI and other advancements in robotic surgery, these developments are coming, and they may be coming sooner than many expect.

“It's coming, and again, it's going to come within probably the next 5 years. It's not going to be 20 years,” he concluded.