One of the main problems for effective control of a minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is the imprecision that caused by hand tremor. In this paper, a novel adaptive filter, the least squares support vector machines adaptive filter (LS-SVMAF), is proposed to overcome this problem. Compared with traditional methods like multi layer perceptron (MLP), LS-SVM shows a superior performance of nonlinear modeling with small scale of data set or high dimensional input space. With the LS-SVMAF, we can model and predict the hand tremor more effectively and improve the precision and reliability in the master-slave robotic system for microsurgery. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter and its superior performance over its competing rivals. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.