Minimally Invasive & Robotic Surgery Patents: Who Leads, Where Gaps Are 2026
- 40.6% concentration at the top. The five leading assignees account for 13,336 of 32,812 records in scope — filing here means clearing dense prior art from a handful of incumbents before anything else.
- Filing volume has pulled back from its 2018 peak. From 1,441 records in 2021 to 816 in 2024, a documented -43% over three years; 2025-2026 figures are still filling in and are not yet comparable.
- A61B dominates, but the informatics layer is thin. 56.9% of records sit in A61B (diagnosis & surgery), while G06T image processing and G16H healthcare informatics each hold under 3% — a much smaller footprint than the mechanical core.
Filing growth compares 2021 (1,441 records) with 2024 (816) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 32,812 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This dataset tracks 32,812 published records filed against a search combining robot-assisted surgery, minimally invasive surgery and surgical robotic systems with the instrument-level claims that make them work — surgical instruments, robotic manipulators, endoscopic imaging, tissue interaction, surgeon consoles and instrument articulation. The scope spans 2015 through the 2026 data cut-off, giving a decade-plus view of how claim activity has moved from the mechanical platform toward the software and imaging layers around it.
Filings run through six major receiving offices, with the United States carrying the largest share of records ahead of the EPO and WIPO's PCT route, and smaller but active filing volumes in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Because publication lags filing by roughly eighteen months, the most recent one to two years in any trend chart will always look thinner than they will eventually turn out to be.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 32,812-record dataset: filing volume over time, and how records distribute across IPC subclasses. Because a single record can carry several IPC codes, the subclass shares below add up to more than 100% of the record total — that is expected and not a data error.
A decade of filing, past its peak
Annual filings rose from 1,228 records in 2017 to a peak of 1,617 in 2018, then eased back; the 2021-to-2024 span alone shows a documented -43% decline from 1,441 to 816 records. Treat 2025 and 2026 figures as provisional — publication lag means they will rise as later filings publish.
The mechanical core still dominates the claim space
A61B (diagnosis & surgery) covers 56.9% of all records, roughly eight times the share of B25J (manipulators & robots) at 7.3%. The imaging and informatics classes — G06T, G16H, G06F and H04N — each sit at or below 2.7%, showing that the software and data layers around the surgical platform carry far fewer claims than the instruments themselves.
Shares are the percentage of the 32,812 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Minimally Invasive & Robotic Surgery Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about minimally invasive & robotic surgery patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited records anchoring this field
Configuring a surgical robotic system (US20230320794A1, CMR Surgical)
The claim describes a control system that reconfigures a surgical robotic system while one robot arm continues operating in surgical mode with an instrument inside the patient's body — coordinating a second arm's configuration change without interrupting the first arm's task.Abstract text drawn directly from the published filing; full claim scope should be read from the granted claims themselves.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US6783524B2 | Robotic surgical tool with ultrasound cauterizing and cutting instrument | 5,630 |
| 2 | US9072535B2 | Surgical stapling instruments with rotatable staple deployment arrangements | 4,767 |
| 3 | US5792135A | Articulated surgical instrument for performing minimally invasive surgery with enhanced dexterity and sensiti… | 4,323 |
| 4 | US6364888B1 | Alignment of master and slave in a minimally invasive surgical apparatus | 3,475 |
| 5 | US5855583A | Method and apparatus for performing minimally invasive cardiac procedures | 3,335 |
| 6 | US7691098B2 | Platform link wrist mechanism | 3,240 |
| 7 | US8800838B2 | Robotically-controlled cable-based surgical end effectors | 3,235 |
| 8 | US8573465B2 | Robotically-controlled surgical end effector system with rotary actuated closure systems | 3,156 |
| 9 | US7806891B2 | Repositioning and reorientation of master/slave relationship in minimally invasive telesurgery | 3,156 |
| 10 | US6817974B2 | Surgical tool having positively positionable tendon-actuated multi-disk wrist joint | 2,957 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older filings that have had more time to accumulate references — read them as a signal of influence on later filers, not as a measure of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three patterns stand out once volume, concentration and technology mix are read together: where claim space is already dense, where it has visibly thinned, and what that implies for a freedom-to-operate check before filing.
Five names set the boundaries of the mechanical platform
With 13,336 of 32,812 records held by the five leading assignees, and 52.2% held by the top ten, most of the core instrument-articulation and manipulator claims are already staked out. A new entrant working on the base robotic arm or console architecture is filing against incumbents, not into open space.
Volume has pulled back from its 2018 peak
Filings peaked at 1,617 records in 2018 and have since eased, with a documented drop from 1,441 records in 2021 to 816 in 2024. Recent-year figures across the leading assignees show sharp year-on-year pullbacks too, though the newest one to two years are still publishing and will read low regardless.
Instrument claims outweigh robotics claims by nearly 8:1
A61B (diagnosis & surgery) covers 56.9% of records against B25J (manipulators & robots) at 7.3% — the surgical instrument itself, not the robotic arm carrying it, is where most claim density sits. Imaging and informatics classes trail well behind both.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to minimally invasive & robotic surgery patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the claims, and where the gaps sit
The ranked leaders span device majors with instrument portfolios built over decades alongside newer robotic-platform entrants; momentum data shows nearly all of the most active filers pulling back sharply in the latest tracked year, consistent with the broader post-2018 decline.
One filer sits well ahead of the field
The leading assignee's 5,829 records is more than five times the fifth-place total of 1,069, an unusually steep drop-off even for a concentrated field. That gap suggests a single dominant platform architecture rather than several competing designs at similar scale.
A steep drop from top five to top ten
Tenth place holds 366 records against 1,069 at fifth — combined, the top ten still only reach 52.2% of the 32,812 records in scope, leaving nearly half the field spread across a long tail of smaller and single-filing entrants.
Co-filing is limited but concentrated
Only ten co-assignee pairs appear in this dataset, with the strongest pairings linking device majors to instrument specialists and, in one case, a research university. Co-filing is the exception here, not the norm — most records list a single corporate assignee.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Intuitive Surgical Operations, Inc. | 8 | -91% |
| Covidien LP | 3 | -92% |
| Cilag GmbH International | 3 | -90% |
| CMR Surgical Ltd | 1 | -93% |
| Ethicon, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Verb Surgical Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| Intuitive Surgical, Inc. | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
A landscape snapshot tells you where claim density sits today. Turning that into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision means drilling into the specific claims that matter to your own instrument or workflow.
Map claims against your own instrument design
Run your specific mechanism — articulation joint, end-effector or console interface — against the dense A61B and B25J claim sets identified here before drafting.
Explore claim-level analysis in EurekaTrack the leading assignees' recent filings
Momentum has shifted sharply downward for every major filer in the latest tracked year; watch whether that reflects a genuine slowdown or simply publication lag.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
One assignee leads clearly with 5,829 of the 32,812 records in scope, more than five times the fifth-place total of 1,069. The top five assignees together hold 40.6% of all records, and the top ten hold 52.2%. That leaves nearly half the field spread across a long tail of 90 further ranked companies plus unranked single-filing entrants, so leadership at the top does not mean the whole field is closed off.
Filing volume has declined from its 2018 peak of 1,617 records to a documented -43% drop between 2021 (1,441 records) and 2024 (816 records) — the last year with a complete publication picture. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that is an artefact of the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication, not evidence of continued decline. Any claim about the trend should stop at 2024 data.
A61B, the IPC subclass covering diagnosis and surgery generally, appears in 56.9% of the 32,812 records in scope — by far the largest share. B25J (manipulators & robots) follows at 7.3%, with body-fluid devices, implants, image processing and healthcare informatics all trailing under 4% each. Because records can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares add up to more than 100%, which is expected.
Relative to the size of the core platform market, filing density is thin in areas like haptic feedback for surgeon consoles, autonomous force sensing at the tissue-instrument interface, multi-arm collision-avoidance control, video-based intraoperative guidance software, and sterilisable modular instrument attachments. These sit adjacent to the dense A61B and B25J core rather than inside it, which is why they show comparatively low claim density even as the underlying platforms mature.
That filing, assigned to CMR Surgical, claims a control system that reconfigures a multi-arm surgical robot while one arm continues operating inside the patient — specifically, altering a second arm's configuration without interrupting the first arm's active surgical task. It does not block robotic surgery generally, or even multi-arm platforms generally; it blocks that specific reconfiguration-while-operating control logic. A workaround would need a materially different sequencing or handoff approach between arms, not just a different instrument.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.