Surgical AI System (SAIS) Developed To Give Performance Assessment to Surgeons; Latest Breakthrough in Surgical Training

In the field of medicine, medical trainees undergo the supervision of more experienced physicians who can guide them in improving their techniques. Training programs are provided by medical institutions to help the students optimize their learning experiences in actual clinical environment.

As modern technology advances, more breakthroughs in education have emerged which do not only benefit the school setting but the medical field as well. With the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), it is now possible for medicine students to undergo machine-learning algorithm.

Cutting Edge in Surgical Education

Surgical AI System (SAIS) was developed by researchers at Caltech and Keck Medicine of USC urologists to provide objective performance assessment to surgeons for improving of their work and patient outcomes. It also aims to guide the surgeons in terms of their skill improvement.

In this technology, SAIS identifies the type of surgery performed by the surgeon and evaluates the quality of execution through video footage analysis of the procedure. The performance of the surgeons are assessed down to the level of individual discrete motions.

The technology, which was published by Communications Medicine journal, can potentially provide surgeons with accurate, consistent, and scalable feedbacks. After the training, SAIS reviews and evaluates the performance of the surgeons during different procedures with the use of videos from various hospitals.

Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences Anima Anandkumar said that in the short term, it is unrealistic for human surgeon to be replaced by AI in high stakes environment such as robotic surgery. "We asked how AI can safely improve surgical outcomes for the patients, and hence, our focus on making human surgeons better and more effective through AI," she added.

To train the AI system, a large volume of annotated video data evaluated by medical professionals was used. During the early stage of development, an unintended bias reached the system where the surgeons are sometimes rated as more or less skilled than the indicated experience. In order to avoid this, the AI's ability to justify its skills assessment was also developed to allow it to provide detailed commentary and identification of specific video clips.

In surgical trainings, human-derived feedback are sometimes not objective or scalable. Meanwhile, AI-derived feedback such as the one delivered by SAIS presents an opportunity to provide actionable commentary to surgeons.

Impact of AI-Assisted Learning

Any form of learning experience that uses machine intelligence to enhance the natural style of learning is considered to be AI-assisted learning. According to UNESCO, AI has the potential to solve some of the present major challenges in education by innovating teaching and learning practices.

The opportunities for AI in online education are broad. Under the AI systems, effective support for online learning and teaching is provided which include automated instructions and adaptive assessments.

However, despite the promising opportunities for AI, it still poses challenges in terms of norms, culture, and student-instructor interactions. Meanwhile, as the AI solutions for teaching and learning continue to evolve, experts are hopeful that this technology can fill the gaps in education.

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