ATLANTA, Ga. — Shriners Children’s has teamed up with Georgia Tech to research and develop a new artificial intelligence tool to assist doctors performing pediatric spinal surgery.
“In this situation, AI is definitely your friend,” said Leanne West, Georgia Tech’s chief engineer of pediatric technology. She also works for Shriners Children’s.
“So, it’s predictive and it’s meant to help understand what might happen during surgery, so you can prevent anything bad from happening,” West said.
The tool will harness thousands of data points from surgical procedures, clinical notes, x-rays and patient histories to predict potentially dangerous changes occurring in the spinal cord.
“We’re trying to avoid those things from happening — it’s kind of like a warning system,” said Dr. Bruce Brenn, chief of anesthesiology at Shriners Philadelphia and the lead researcher of this project.
How the AI tool works
Brenn said the AI tool could help lower the risk of injury during surgery and help doctors make better decisions, like when to raise or lower blood pressure or if surgery should be staged on different days instead of all at once.
“What we’re trying to do is use data from a lot of different patients to give us information, as opposed to just like one surgeon or a few surgeon’s experience,” Brenn said.
“One of the things that AI is really good at is seeing trends, number crunching, figuring things out that we might miss,” West said.
West said the tool is still in development but centers on analyzing data. Once it’s officially up and running, she’s confident it will have a positive impact on patients and families, but also on doctors.
“If you can prevent negative things from happening during a procedure, that’s always a win, right? And I think that additionally it maybe even helps the clinicians feel more confident in what they’re doing,” West said.
Shriners Children’s is also building a research institute in Atlanta in partnership with Georgia Tech. That’s slated to open later this year.
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