Boston-based Activ Surgical designed ActivSight to provide enhanced visualization and real-time on-demand surgical insights in the operating room. The easy-to-adapt model seamlessly attaches to laparoscopic and robotic systems. Activ Surgical received CE mark approval for ActivSight in December 2022. The FDA cleared the technology in April 2021. The company aims to transform the surgical experience using emerging technologies and data.

This week, Nvidia, a company best known for its high-powered graphic processing units (GPUs) debuted a platform for the development of AI-powered medical devices. The device, called Clara Holoscan MGX, provides computing power allowing medical sensors to process multiple data streams in parallel, train AI algorithms, and visualize biology in real time. Clara Holoscan MGX, debuted at the Nvidia's 2022 GTC conference, is an "open, scalable robotics platform," as CEO Jensen Huang put it in a keynote address. It's a hardware and software stack designed to help connect robotic medical devices or sensors, with AI applications. Take the process of endoscopy as an example.

Learn more about what comes next. In 2016, Dr. Peter Kim, founder of Activ Surgical, a digital surgery company, demonstrated a proof of concept of fully autonomous robotic surgery on soft tissue, suturing, or stitching up a wound. Since then, Activ Surgical has been working on harnessing machine learning, augmented reality, and other advanced technologies to develop new ways of collaborating with surgeons. "We want to keep surgeons in the loop, to give them more data than they ever had before," says CEO Todd Usen. Usen likens Activ Surgical's work in surgery to crossing goalposts in the drive toward autonomous driving: It might take a while to get there, but the industry is ramping up systematically.

In May, I asked whether AI should assist in surgical decision-making. Following a recent venture round, investors seem to be voting yes as a company called Activ Surgical announces a $15 million raise. Activ rolled out an AI/ML platform called ActivEdge, which is designed to provide real-time intelligence and visualization to surgeons. The platform and its associated products will be initially available in the US market, with plans to commercialize globally in 2021. The goal of integrating AI decision making with human surgical capabilities is to reduce medical errors.

There's a push for AI/ML to reduce the staggering number of preventable deaths due to surgical error. The first and second leading causes of death in the United States are heart disease and cancer. The third is now coronavirus. Astoundingly, the answer is preventable medical errors. Surgical errors in particular account for 26% of these deaths and cost somewhere north of $36 billion in the U.S. I did a double take when I read those stats while reporting this story.