AI will help surgeons to perfect their craft
ForSight Robotics uses artificial intelligence to help eye surgeons learn from each other
As artificial intelligence continues to improve, it isn’t uncommon to hear someone give voice to the concern that it may eventually eclipse human capability. This has already happened in several fields like computation and data processing, and the same is occurring elsewhere, from creative applications to medical ones.
Yet here is yet no serious risk of AI replacing humans. As noted by Stanford professor and AI21 Labs co-founder and co-CEO Yoav Shoham, “One of my colleagues said about general medicine that AI won’t replace radiologists, but radiologists who use AI will replace radiologists that do not.”
The idea that AI is the key to unlocking the next level of specialist ability is at the core of several start-ups and established companies in Israel. One such company is ForSight Robotics, a med-tech company that has developed ORYOM, a
robotic surgical platform that enables surgeons to perform eye surgeries more precisely.
The procedure co-performed by the robot is high in demand and requires precision and expert execution. To that end, ForSight uses AI-driven computer visualization and machine learning to collect information from thousands of procedures, which can then be used to help surgeons improve their technique.
ForSight also uses AI to monitor
surgical scenes and provide guidance and alerts to operating surgeons during the operation in order to maximize efficiency and quality.
ForSight’s president and chief medical officer Dr. Joseph Nathan is a firm believer in AI’s ability to elevate operations without replacing the person operating it.
“AI will not replace surgeons. It will empower surgeons to do better procedures. It will empower surgeons to
perfect their procedures,” he predicted.
That said, Nathan said he doesn’t believe that Shoham’s full statement rings true to the surgical field, as even surgeons without AI helping them will always have a place in the field, largely due to the fact that there is a need for so many of them.
“There’s a [large] need for surgeons and that will not change,” he said. “There’s a huge gap today in the amount of patients that need the [cataract correction] procedure and the amount of surgeons available to do it.”
That isn’t to say that the proliferation of AI in the surgical sector won’t serve to benefit all surgeons. For one, Nathan pointed out, artificial intelligence is one of the tools that can help close the aforementioned gap between the number of surgeons and the number of patients in need of surgery – not by creating more surgeons but by expediting the surgery process and making existing surgeons more available.
“Introducing AI will grant the ability to be more efficient and to do more procedures more accurately,” he said. He further explained that the technology enables the rapid and widespread collection and dispersal of data from the most expert surgeons, which in turn allows surgeons everywhere to improve their own technique, drastically raising the quality of procedures everywhere.