With robotics and AI advancing and evolving at a rapid pace, there is a future where surgeons could be replaced, even if that reality is still a long way from coming to fruition.
AI-based robots are already beginning to complete some steps of certain procedures, and will slowly be trained to take over more and more of those steps until they can complete surgery without physical input from surgeons.
These three surgeons discussed the future of AI in the orthopedic and spine fields, and the capabilities it could have in the next few years at Becker’s 23rd Annual Spine, Orthopedic and Pain Management-Driven ASC + The Future of Spine Conference in Chicago.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What are you excited about for AI orthopedics going forward? Where do you think it is going to change the game?
Bryce Basques, MD. Spine Surgeon and Director, Minimally Invasive and Endoscopic Spine Surgery, Brown University (Providence, R.I.): Taking it to the next level, it could literally come for our jobs as surgeons. We’re not anywhere close to that yet, but I think there will be a point where an AI-based physical robot will be able to perform a surgery as well as or better than the average surgeon. That brings up the question of legal risk, liability and human supervision. This is already happening. Medtronic is coming out with a robot that will essentially give us a trajectory for a screw, and then the surgeon physically puts the screw in. The next iteration of this is, now, the robot will let you do decompression. And then the next iteration of that is they’re going to have the robot actually do it itself without actual physical input from you. They’re slowly adopting these steps of the procedure and I think that eventually they will adopt the entire procedure. I don’t know if it’s going to happen in our careers per se, but I think it will probably happen at some point.
Omkar Baxi, MD. Board of Directors, Mid Atlantic Permanente Medical Group; Orthopedic Hand Surgeon, Mid-Atlantic States, Kaiser Permanente (Washington, D.C.): It’s not really the sexy problems that are going to be the most impactful. So in my world, I have to decide when the distal radius fractures, what angulation I need to operate on. Right now, there’s so much data that’s kind of equivocal and we use averages to decide what that’s going to happen. When people talk about patient-specific treatments, I think that’s where AI is going to have the most impact. Right now, I rely on a quick interaction with a patient to say what their history and what their activity level might be. With AI knowing that patient, that prediction of who’s actually a patient that could benefit from that surgery, I think that’s going to become much more predictable and that prediction will carry more impact.
Ashvin Dewan, MD. Orthopedic Surgeon, Houston Methodist Hospital: Five years ago, we couldn’t even conceptualize what is happening now. But I think what I’m really excited about are these new things called “world models.” An LLM today is basically predicated on a corpus of text and knowledge, and it’s predicting the next thing based on all the context it has. An oversimplification of the world model is that you’ve exposed the model to physical activity and patterns of activity over many, many repetitions, so now it’s anticipating what the next move is going to be in a physical world. The really interesting thing is they’re starting with factories and automation where it’s much more predictable. Imagine a future where now you have a scrub tech robot that has done, you know, 60,000 total knees and 1,000 of those are with you. I guarantee that physical robot is going to be way more predictable and expect what you want more accurately than perhaps even a human. Then, one day, it’ll come for our hands as well.
At the Becker’s 32nd Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, taking place October 29-31 in Chicago, ASC leaders, surgeons and healthcare executives will explore strategies to drive growth, enhance operational performance, navigate reimbursement challenges and prepare for the future of ambulatory surgery. Apply for complimentary registration now.
