XRlabs announced recently that it has achieved the first-in-human use of real-time physical artificial intelligence (AI) integrated with the Orbeye 4K 3D exoscope during a neurosurgical procedure at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, USA.
As per an XRlabs press release, this marks the first clinical deployment of Nvidia Jetson Thor, Nvidia’s next-generation edge AI computing platform, and is also believed to be the first documented use of a physical AI-enabled exoscope in neurosurgery.
The procedure was performed by David Langer (Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, USA) and Randy D’Amico (Zucker School of Medicine, New York, USA).
“We always believed this would be the next way of operating, and now it is here,” said Langer. “This was not incremental progress—this was a meaningful leap forward. Combining advanced exoscope imaging with immersive visualisation on Apple Vision Pro, tool tracking, and speech control, begins to approach the holy grail of operative neurosurgery. Under the demands of the operating room, this technology delivered.”
XRlabs has developed what it describes as the first device-agnostic surgical intelligence platform, which integrates real-time AI into active surgical environments to enhance visualisation, situational awareness and workflow while preserving established clinical systems. The system processes live surgical video intraoperatively, enabling computer vision-based instrument tracking, gaze- and voice-responsive automation with optimised AI inference and intraoperative scene recognition without modification to the Orbeye hardware.
As the platform evolves, XRlabs will continue to refine these foundational capabilities, and adopt the enterprise-grade Nvidia IGX Thor platform—which offers high performance and functional safety—to support scalable deployment in clinical environments, the release adds.
“This milestone marks the emergence of surgical intelligence as a runtime capability inside the operating room,” said Ali Haddad, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of XRlabs. “By aligning with Nvidia’s three-computer framework for AI training, simulation and runtime, we are embedding intelligence directly into surgical workflows. Our vision is for surgical intelligence to become foundational infrastructure across modern surgery.”
