UK health tech company Digital Surgery has developed surgical artificial intelligence (AI) system for the operating room (OR).

Digital surgery

Image: Dr. Sanjay Purkayastha at Imperial College performing a bariatric procedure and demonstrating the clinical efficacy of Digital Surgery's AI and Computer Vision platform. Photo: courtesy of Business Wire.

Claimed to be the world’s first real-time AI system, the AI platform of Digital Surgery will offer road maps and serves as a navigational system for every OR and surgery center.

By providing advanced surgical procedure road maps, the patented AI platform will help reduce risk for surgical team in the OR.

Digital Surgery co-founder and CEO Dr Jean Nehme said: “This is a huge milestone for the future of surgery because it lays the foundation for how AI and computer vision will support surgical teams to deliver safer surgeries. It also enables the next generation of robotic surgery, giving these future systems the capability to function more intelligently and safely.”

The new AI platform will enable to handle multiple variables ranging from staff turnover, language, culture, tools, resources, to the training and skill level of the surgical team.

The AI will monitor conditions during surgery through a camera view, and cross-checks and correlates the anatomy and actions against the largest library of surgical road maps.

The OR team can look out the platform analyzing and predicting next steps in real time.

Digital Surgery said it will launch operating room efficiency platform, GoSurgery, later this year.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust consultant laparoscopic, bariatric and robotic surgeon Dr Sanjay Purkayastha said: “What Digital Surgery has done with this technology feels like a comparison with the advent of laparoscopy, which was a truly disruptive and groundbreaking revolution and paradigm shift in surgery.

“This resulted in a huge change in approach from maximally invasive to minimally invasive surgery. In the next five years, I expect there to be a transformation from non-AI to AI supported surgery as common practice, benefiting training, patient safety, data collection and outcomes analysis.”

Digital Surgery already provides mobile surgical training app, Touch Surgery, which is embedded in over 160 residency programs and used by more than two million surgeons, healthcare professionals and others across the globe.