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As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, we posed a simple question to our doctors:
"What is the single most futuristic thing we're doing in surgery today?"
Here are some answers.
"Well, it depends on how you define “doing” because I would say tissue engineering and its applications, but most of them are not quite in the doing stage. They're being tried here and there. And not only depending on how you define doing, but depending on how you define tissue engineering. It's out there in heart valves, for example, in congenital and transplant. The stuff going on in labs is very exciting and shows the promise of substituting engineered tissues that are much more successful long term with the stuff we currently do. But it's still so futuristic, it's not quite there yet.
The robotics applications are somewhat futuristic. In the last couple of years, it's really started to take off in ways that it hadn't for 20 years. And it's not so much that we're doing different things with it, but they're finally able to do many standard things and many more advanced things that were out of the reach for robotics before, and it's likely to open up an acceleration in technology. We got away from the era when only one company was supportable by the amount of robotics being done, which had a constraining effect on innovation. As it gets more successful and into more hands and more cases, then the competitive pressures that bring other companies and other innovators in will probably start to bear fruit.
I wish I could say that AI was that thing, but it would be a little bit like tissue engineering. It's sort of teetering there on the brink of application, but not quite in application."
Read our in-depth interview with Dr. Smith about the current and future state of the field of surgery
"I think the biggest thing is working not as a single surgeon but as a whole, working across a diagnosis. It used to be that some problems were only surgical, and there are still some of those, but most of the medical diseases or diagnoses are now multifaceted. So, the approach needs to be multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary if you will. No surgeon I know works in a vacuum, whether you're cardiac, vascular, or breast surgery.
There are not many disease processes where you do not have to consider the whole patient. It’s problem-solving, and we're going to bring all these experts to sort out the best approach. Perhaps it's medical, perhaps it's surgical, and perhaps in the future, it's some other management altogether that we're not even aware of, like genetic management. Instead of just being a surgery department, we’ll likely have a vascular disease process management team and a breast problem diagnosis management team. It will change how we think. You won’t just exist in your little world but also be aware of what else is happening in medicine, genetics, radiation, and everything else."
Read our in-depth interview with Dr. Rao about the current and future state of breast surgery
"Well, one of the biggest things is what everyone is already talking about, artificial intelligence. Maybe we'll get to the point where you'll have a doc bot that you can chat with and it will accurately diagnose you. Who knows? But I think the other uses of advanced neural networks are incredibly profound.
More specifically, one of the most exciting things that we're doing is trying to figure out new paradigms for how we educate people. It's wonderful if you can be in the presence of a world expert like Jen Kuo, Eric Kou, or Katie McManus and learn how to do certain things, but access to those experts isn’t easy. So, we have to be better at educating the next generations of practitioners. One of the really cool projects that Katie McManus is doing is using virtual reality to help medical students get more out of their education.
For example, one project uses virtual reality to train them on how to successfully interact in an operating room environment before they actually get there. How awesome is that? There are some really exciting things going on in the education world. As things like augmented reality and virtual reality start to make their way into it, I think it's only going to get more and more interesting."
Read our in-depth interview with Dr. Lee about the current and future state of endocrine surgery
"The most futuristic thing in surgery today is how technology is going to completely revolutionize what surgery looks like in the long term—everything is changing, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence. That's going to change the way we interact with patients, the way we interact with data, the way we ask questions, both of our patients, of ourselves, and of the data. AI has the potential to give insights during surgery, like how much force is being applied to the tissue, or to highlight anatomy that you may have been blind to, or even help you identify or recognize cancer that was invisible to the human eye.
Robotic surgery is another area where innovation is driving the future. Most surgeries I do nowadays are all robotic, taking advantage of the most cutting-edge latest developments, technology-wise, in the field. When you add AI into the equation and, let’s call it compute—using computers to do the math on the data to then bring insights into the case—I think it’s going to be amazing.
I envision AI being incorporated into surgery, whether through robotics or through other technological means that perhaps improve the way surgery is performed. The possibilities are vast, and as these technologies advance. It's completely going to revolutionize everything."
Read our in-depth interview with Dr. Krikhely about the current and future state of bariatric surgery
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- An Interview with Dr. Craig Smith, Heart Surgeon, Chair of Surgery, and Author of Nobility in Small Things
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