Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
A 48-year-old man from Bedfordshire, England, has become the first patient ever to undergo brain surgery with live artificial intelligence assistance.
Rhys Hibbert had been suffering from partial loss of vision due to a tumor, yet surgeons managed to remove the growth with the help of an innovative AI system, ultimately saving his sight.
The tumor - which was discovered in 2024 - was located on the patient’s pituitary gland, a marble-sized structure at the base of the brain that is surrounded by key blood vessels such as the carotid arteries as well as the optic nerves.
As the non-cancerous tumor pressed against these nerves, Hibbert began to lose much of his peripheral vision, which severely impacted his life and made it impossible to walk unaided.
AI-guided brain surgery
Operating in such a clustered part of the brain can be risky, as misplacing an incision by even a fraction can damage vital nerves or arteries, potentially causing permanent blindness or even death. Normally, surgeons attempting such a procedure would first study scans of the patient’s brain to familiarize themselves with the local architecture and decide how best to remove the tumor.
Yet Hibbert had volunteered to be operated on using the new AI model, which had been trained on hundreds of brain scans and was designed to be able to identify risky areas to avoid, thus highlighting the safest possible path for extracting the tumor.
Developed by the UCL Hawkes Institute, the system provides real-time feedback to surgeons based on what is happening during live surgery, rather than requiring operators to rely on previous scans.
“By learning from hundreds of surgical videos, it has been exposed to a breadth of surgical examples that would take a surgeon many years to encounter,” explained Dr Sophia Bano, technical lead for the AI system, in a statement.
“It is designed to help recognise critical anatomy, surgical instruments and tissue interactions in real time, supporting the surgeon during highly delicate procedures.”
After doctors successfully removed the tumor, Hibbert noticed an immediate improvement in his vision. “When I came round… I could see everything in the room clearly,” he said.
“It feels like I’ve got a 360‑degree panoramic view of everything around me,” he added, and reports that within a week he was able to walk without needing to wear glasses or use a walking stick.
However, despite this major step forward for AI, the team behind the new system are keen to stress that the surgery itself was very much performed and controlled by humans, with technology merely providing assistance by helping doctors identify key brain structures with greater precision.
Commenting on the historic achievement, James Frith, the UK’s Health Innovation Minister, said that “this is an example of AI at its best: patients getting care previously deemed unimaginable thanks to the latest groundbreaking technology.”
