Mount Sinai Hospital in New York is utilizing an AI-powered surgical intelligence platform developed by Theator to address the variability in surgical outcomes. The platform automates the capture, de-identification, and structuring of surgical videos, connecting them with patient outcomes in EHR systems. By analyzing the data, Mount Sinai aims to identify optimal surgical practices and reduce postoperative complications. The technology was successfully showcased at a surgical conference, demonstrating its potential to transform surgical care by digitizing the operating room and unlocking valuable surgical data.
Mount Sinai, a renowned New York hospital, is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to address the issue of variability in surgical outcomes. Dr. Ketan Badani, vice chairman of urology and robotics operations at Mount Sinai, recognized the need for a solution and sought the assistance of Theator, a health IT company specializing in AI-driven approaches to improve surgical outcomes.
Currently, surgical outcomes vary not only across different regions but even within the same hospital. These disparities directly affect patient care and hospital economics by influencing complications, re-admissions, and operative time. The main challenge lies in the absence of comprehensive data for assessing outcomes.
Dr. Badani highlighted the limitations of existing technologies that rely on manual recording, requiring staff to remember to press record and then transfer the video from the operating room camera system to a storage device. Additionally, these videos need to be structured for meaningful analysis, making the entire process time-consuming and inefficient.
To overcome these challenges, the new AI platform automates the entire process without the need for additional cameras or sensors in the operating room. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology automatically captures and de-identifies all minimally invasive and robotic surgical videos, structuring them with procedural steps. It also catalogs intraoperative events, safety milestones, and procedure complexity.
The AI platform goes beyond simply structuring procedural steps; it analyzes the complexity of each case, identifies intraoperative events like bleeding, detects safety milestones, and recognizes when the camera is out of focus. Dr. Badani emphasized the importance of connecting surgical videos with patient outcomes stored in electronic health record (EHR) systems to understand the impact of various factors on a patient’s recovery.
Typically, postoperative notes within EHRs provide a retrospective account of the procedure but may lack accuracy. Dr. Badani stressed the critical need for unbiased and real-time structuring of surgical data to ground it in truth and enhance its accuracy. The AI platform accomplishes this by integrating surgical videos with patient outcomes, enabling insights into optimal surgical practices and the standardization of procedures across hospital systems to reduce postoperative complications and improve surgical quality.
Mount Sinai installed Theator’s technology ahead of the Society of Urologic Robotic Surgeons (SURS) annual meeting, where live procedures were broadcasted with real-time AI-powered annotations generated by the Surgical Intelligence Platform. This groundbreaking capability showcased the potential of AI in structuring surgical videos accurately and in real time.
By connecting postoperative data with patient outcomes, Mount Sinai aims to improve understanding of how intraoperative events influence recovery and enhance overall patient outcomes. The hospital has already presented an abstract on the use of Theator’s Surgical Intelligence Platform technology at the American Urology Association annual meeting, highlighting AI’s potential to revolutionize surgical care.
Dr. Badani emphasized that while hardware innovation in the operating room has advanced significantly, the digitization of the OR has been limited. With vast amounts of unutilized surgical video data, the industry must embrace AI-driven solutions to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improved patient care.
He advised that any AI technology implemented in the OR should meet the highest privacy and security standards, treating confidential information with utmost care. The AI system should also provide clinically relevant, accurate, and timely insights that can be easily incorporated into health systems to enhance patient care. Hospitals must be diligent in selecting AI platforms that meet these criteria.
Recording, cataloging, and annotating surgical videos manually is a labor-intensive task that is often neglected. Leveraging a digital platform to organize and analyze surgical videos is crucial for hospitals and surgeons to harness the untapped potential of this valuable data.
