Artificial intelligence (AI) meets us in our everyday lives. Whether it’s a Google search completing our questions, Maps navigating us to traffic-free routes or ChatGPT drafting our email responses, AI adds a level of ease to routine, day-to-day tasks. Yet the power of AI in revolutionizing our lives goes beyond assistance with simple tasks. AI has the power to transform healthcare and elevate life-changing medical treatment.
AI has already proven to be a tremendous asset in healthcare diagnostics and patient monitoring. I believe that integrating AI into the operating room is the next logical step in implementing AI-based systems and machine learning into medical care in a process that would significantly benefit both surgeons and patients.
Surgical robotics is one of the next frontiers for optimizing AI. Following are four ways robotic surgery can utilize AI to elevate level of care, improve patient outcomes and reshape the healthcare industry.
Specialists spend years, often decades, mastering and finetuning their skills. In medical procedures, physicians observe hundreds of surgeries to learn different methods and apply the best techniques to their practice, yet they are often held back by human limitations.
AI-based systems have the capability to absorb a sea of information in mere seconds. Surgical robotics can be developed with “superhuman” advantages at their core, which optimize AI to maximize the potential use of information. Not constrained by time or memory, AI-based systems can be fed recordings of thousands of surgeries in seconds and can remember the first procedure they observe with equal precision to the last.
Outside of the medical industry, Google provides an example of how AI can integrate and utilize large sets of data. Developed by Google’s DeepMind AI lab, the AI computing system AlphaGo was taught to play a game more complex than chess called Go. AlphaGo “learned” to play the game by being fed over 30 million moves by expert players in a few days.
Robotic surgery can thus rely on AI absorbing significantly higher volumes of data which can be utilized as a learning tool for surgeons at all stages of their careers. From educating physicians on different methodologies to centralizing access for surgeons in developing regions, AI can reshape the way physicians learn, practice and perfect their surgical skills.
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Interesting! I think as well in dental surgery digitalization plays a more and more important role. For example, cad cam restorations are standard in deontology nowadays.