The Future of Surgery Is Robotic, Data-Driven, and Artificially Intelligent

As far back as 3,500 years ago ancient Egyptian doctors were performing invasive surgeries. Even though our tools and knowledge have improved drastically over time, until very recently surgery was still a manual task for human hands. "We're on the verge of what we might call the second wave in surgical robotics," said Catherine Mohr, vice president of strategy at Intuitive Surgical, while speaking at Singularity University's Exponential Medicine conference this week. IBM Watson: Watson is an expert-system type of AI. Watson can store more medical information than any single human can store and and give responses to natural language queries from surgeons. Watson (or AI like it) will become an intelligent surgical assistant.