AI in spine care has been commonly leveraged to support administrative tasks, but one of its real potentials lies in imaging, David Skaggs, MD, said.
Dr. Skaggs, co-director of the Spine Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, shared his outlook for an upcoming episode of Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast.
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: Can you go through some of the biggest innovations that you’ve seen develop in pediatric spine care over the last few years?
Dr. David Skaggs: One of the biggest that’s just happening right now is getting a synthetic CT from an MRI, and this is probably the most important in children since they are most susceptible to radiation. It’s one of the few things I’ve seen in medicine where AI actually makes a difference in practical terms. When we get an MRI, a CT comes out in addition, really just doing one quick sequence. It might take a few minutes longer, but you can get an amazing quality CT that’s accurate to within one millimeter, including 3D reconstructions. For pediatrics, what this does is save children from unnecessary radiation. But if we think about the bigger picture in adult spine patients, what it could also do is save people from getting two studies. Instead of someone being sent for an MRI and at a separate time being sent for a CT, it could all be done at once.
One of the biggest advances in the past decade or so in spine surgery has been using navigation and robotics intraoperatively. And up until now that has required a CT scan, and now we can use this synthetic CT. We can load that up into navigation and/or robotics, and all of a sudden we don’t radiate the patient at any point for navigation or robotic usage, which is a complete game changer.
Q: When working with pediatric patients, what kind of developments are you excited about in terms of having tools or navigation technologies that are tailored to them?
DS: I have to admit, I never even saw a robot until I came to Cedars-Sinai … One of my partners, Corey Walker, MD, taught me how to use a robot. Kids in college and high school frequently have something called spondylolysis, which basically means a fracture most commonly of L5 and in the old days to fix this, you had to open them up and put in screws and rods and hooks. Now with the use of a robot, we could literally make a two centimeter incision, or smaller, and put screws perfectly across the fracture site. I never imagined I’d be doing outpatient pediatric spine surgery, but the use of robotics and navigation have really changed what we can do.
