Artificial intelligence can play an important role in improving precision in spine surgery, Robert masson, MD, told Becker’s.
Dr. Masson, of Masson Spine Institute in Ocoee, Fla., discussed his outlook.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What do you think will be the next big way that spine surgeons take advantage of AI?
Dr. Robert Masson: I don’t think enough surgeons meticulously take the story of a spine health crisis and marry it to the imaging abnormalities. And I think there are too many ambiguous, multilevel procedures done where it’s not precision-targeted. As a micro-spine surgeon, precision targeting is everything to me, so AI provides an incredible framework for correlating the radiographical abnormalities to the very specific and precise symptom complex and storyline aggravating factors. There are just so many details when we talk about indirect reconstruction versus microdecompression strategies. Sometimes you need to be indirect by elevating the roof in the floor of the spine at a segment, but sometimes you can get away with the decompression.
I really think that there’s advanced science coming where our ability to predict which one will have the highest functional recovery outcome is very possible with intelligent application of AI. The hard part is just where the closed language model comes from that sets the best data? A surgeon who’s biased for indirect decompression is going to say to do an ALIF or TLIF day long, but someone who’s biased to endoscopic is going to focus on the decompression. The reality is, that’s still an institutional problem. We haven’t figured out the best way to create standards.
