Johnson & Johnson turns to Aussie AI to speed up surgeries

Johnson & Johnson has signed up Australian software engineering company Max Kelsen to use artificial intelligence to speed up the supply of surgical instruments to hospitals, helping to alleviate the backlog of surgeries that built up during the COVID-19 pandemic. The US pharmaceutical and medical device behemoth said it had begun to use Max Kelsen's SAVI platform, which uses cameras and machine learning to automatically identify and catalogue surgical instruments after they are used in an operation. A single operation can take 10 trays of complex surgical instruments, says Warwick Shaw, customer solutions partner, Johnson & Johnson Medical. The system, which runs part on an iPad and part on machine learning models in the cloud, cuts by at least 40 per cent the time it takes to catalogue the instruments, ensure they are contamination free and in working order, and pass them on to the next hospital, Johnson & Johnson said. While hospitals generally own their own surgical instruments for departments such as accident and emergency, the instruments for specialist surgeries such as knee replacements and spinal fusions are typically checked in and out from equipment rental companies such as Johnson & Johnson like books from a library.