Welcome to ASU MARGIN Lab

Welcome to the Medical Automation, Robotics and General Intelligence Lab (MARGIN Lab) at Arizona State University (ASU). Our mission is to advance intelligent healthcare technologies through cutting-edge research in surgical robotics, AI-driven perception, and medical device innovation.

We develop machine learning and robotic systems to support robotic-assisted and autonomous surgical tasks, including surgical scene understanding, identification and tracking of instruments, robots, tissues, and organs, and robotic manipulation, while also exploring smart medical tools for clinical environments. At MARGIN Lab, we strive to build intelligent systems that can collaborate seamlessly with clinicians and improve the safety, precision, reliability, and accessibility of healthcare.

We are always looking for passionate students to join the team (more info) !

News

May/21/2026 – Undergraduate student Juha Choi receives Fall 2026 ASU FURI award.

May/17/2026 – Our workshop proposal, "The Evolving Landscape of Surgical Robotics (ELSR): Foundation Models Meet New Robotic Embodiments", is accepted by IROS 2026.

Apr/22/2026 – PI Shan Lin is selected for the Mayo Clinic and ASU Alliance for Health Care 2026 Faculty Summer Residency program.

Mar/12/2026 – Jessica Burgner-Kahrs and Lueder Alexander Kahrs visited MARGIN Lab.

Mar/11/2026 – Paper TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models is available online.

Jan/31/2026 – Paper TwinTrack: Bridging Vision and Contact Physics for Real-Time Tracking of Unknown Dynamic Objects is accepted by ICRA 2026.

Jan/30/2026 – Paper PalpAid: Multimodal Pneumatic Tactile Sensor for Tissue Palpation is accepted by RoboSoft 2026.

Jan/2026 – Excited to have undergraduate student Juha Choi join the lab.

Nov/10/2025 – Paper SurgXBench: Explainable Vision-Language Model Benchmark for Surgery is accepted by WACV 2026.

... see all News