Artificial Intelligence in the Operating Room

While the challenges in the healthcare industry are constantly increasing, hospitals adopting new technologies have helped to alleviate some of those struggles in the operating room. Discussing this topic is Dennis Kogan, co-founder, and CEO of Caresyntax, and Eric King, investment director at Intel Capital with host Alex Flores, Director of Global Health Solutions at Intel’s Network and Edge Group.

“It becomes a delicate system that combines facility-specific issues,” Kogan says. “Post-pandemic, there were factors like staffing where experienced nurses are leaving for various reasons and they are being replaced with, for example, younger professionals or traveling nurses which come into the system that is often quite tailored to individual setups of a facility or physician.”

Clearly, this change in operations has caused additional stress on staff and returning to pre-pandemic efficiency is a challenge.

King agreed, saying while the surgeon is the lead on the surgery, there are a lot of other members in the room who need to be properly trained. With staffing shortages as well as nurses traveling in and out of the operating room, getting a team to work together efficiently with quality outcomes isn’t as simple as it was previously. To fill this gap, Caresyntax’s platforms can help improve team dynamics during a surgical procedure for the most successful staffing outcome.

The introduction of newer technology is supporting surgeons in real-time and using computer vision-based aides that do turn-by-turn type navigation of the operation. These technologies can determine anatomical structures and even warn physicians of the proximity of certain arteries.

Because of technology, experts can even remotely “step” into the operating room and provide guidance or feedback as surgeons are moving forward on complex surgeries.

“There are good artificial intelligent stratification mechanisms for being able to support more objectively the decision-making process for physicians or case managers at difficult stages,” Kogan says.

Caresyntax and Intel are looking to the future of innovation in medicine where the industry “wraps the edge, the cloud, the analytics, the AI and automation, there is ample room for precision medicine surgery,” Kogan explains. “There are so many notes where take into account the data and the profile and create algorithms and applications that can help nudge the process in the optimal way in the decision tree you are creating personalized medicine in surgery, and that’s the big vision.”

To learn more, connect with Alex Flores, Dennis Kogan and Eric King on LinkedIn or visit Caresyntax.

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