Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro. Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple's mixed-reality headsets. Apple released the headsets to the public in February, and they've largely been a commercial flop. But practitioners in some industries, including architecture and medicine, have been testing how they might serve particular needs.

Objectives Computer vision (CV) is a field of artificial intelligence that enables machines to interpret and understand images and videos. CV has the potential to be of assistance in the operating room (OR) to track surgical instruments. We built a CV algorithm for identifying surgical instruments in the neurosurgical operating room as a potential solution for surgical instrument tracking and management to decrease surgical waste and opening of unnecessary tools. Methods We collected 1660 images of 27 commonly used neurosurgical instruments. Images were labeled using the VGG Image Annotator and split into 80% training and 20% testing sets in order to train a U-Net Convolutional Neural Network using 5-fold cross validation. Results Our U-Net achieved a tool identification accuracy of 80-100% when distinguishing 25 classes of instruments, with 19/25 classes having accuracy over 90%. The model performance was not adequate for sub classifying Adson, Gerald, and Debakey forceps, which had accuracies of 60-80%. Conclusions We demonstrated the viability of using machine learning to accurately identify surgical instruments. Instrument identification could help optimize surgical tray packing, decrease tool usage and waste, decrease incidence of instrument misplacement events, and assist in timing of routine instrument maintenance. More training data will be needed to increase accuracy across all surgical instruments that would appear in a neurosurgical operating room. Such technology has the potential to be used as a method to be used for proving what tools are truly needed in each type of operation allowing surgeons across the world to do more with less.

While the challenges in the healthcare industry are constantly increasing, hospitals adopting new technologies have helped to alleviate some of those struggles in the operating room. Discussing this topic is Dennis Kogan, co-founder, and CEO of Caresyntax, and Eric King, investment director at Intel Capital with host Alex Flores, Director of Global Health Solutions at Intel's Network and Edge Group. "It becomes a delicate system that combines facility-specific issues," Kogan says. "Post-pandemic, there were factors like staffing where experienced nurses are leaving for various reasons and they are being replaced with, for example, younger professionals or traveling nurses which come into the system that is often quite tailored to individual setups of a facility or physician." Clearly, this change in operations has caused additional stress on staff and returning to pre-pandemic efficiency is a challenge.

This funding round was led by Casdin Capital, which was joined by Vensana Capital, PFM Health Sciences, Twine Ventures, Upside Partnership, and Operator Partners as well as a number of notable individual investors. Apella's initial products include sensors installed in the operating room and harnesses a variety of artificial intelligence approaches to collect and analyze new data about surgery. And this data contributes to applications targeted at improving hospital operations, surgical quality, staff training and real-time decision making with the overall goal of improving the quality of surgical care. The funding round will support expanded implementation of Apella's technology with hospital partners. And it will also allow Apella to grow its team and develop new applications based on its core platform and computer vision and machine learning capabilities.

"Apella believes that every patient deserves the best possible outcome from surgery," commented David Schummers, co-founder and CEO of Apella. "Our technology is aimed at helping each member of the surgical team to do their best job." Apella's initial products include sensors installed in the operating room and harness a variety of artificial intelligence approaches to collect and analyze new data about surgery. This data contributes to applications targeted at improving hospital operations, surgical quality, staff training and real-time decision making with the overall goal of improving the quality of surgical care. "At Apella, we know that you can't improve what you can't measure," continued Schummers.

The Company's technology harnesses artificial intelligence to create a systematic method for process improvement and quality control in surgery.

When asked about their willingness to allow robots powered by AI technology to operate on their young children (ages eight and younger), Millennial parents in a 2018 IEEE global survey were likely to allow it, particularly in Asia: 82 percent in China and 78 percent in India said they would be "very likely". Meanwhile, 45 percent in both the U.S. and U.K. say they would be "very likely". Compared to a recent 2020 global survey, a majority of Millennial parents are 29 percent extremely or 31 percent very likely to allow robots powered by AI to conduct surgery on their child. Though parents in China are 63 percent very and 26 percent extremely likely to allow robotic surgery on their child, 41 percent of American parents say they are not likely at all to allow it.

The Operating Room Scheduling (ORS) problem is the task of assigning patients to operating rooms, taking into account different specialties, lengths and priority scores of each planned surgery, operating room session durations, and the availability of beds for the entire length of stay both in the Intensive Care Unit and in the wards. A proper solution to the ORS problem is of primary importance for the healthcare service quality and the satisfaction of patients in hospital environments. In this paper we first present a solution to the problem based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). The solution is tested on benchmarks with realistic sizes and parameters, on three scenarios for the target length on 5-day scheduling, common in small-medium sized hospitals, and results show that ASP is a suitable solving methodology for the ORS problem in such setting. Then, we also performed a scalability analysis on the schedule length up to 15 days, which still shows the suitability of our solution also on longer plan horizons. Moreover, we also present an ASP solution for the rescheduling problem, i.e. when the off-line schedule cannot be completed for some reason. Finally, we introduce a web framework for managing ORS problems via ASP that allows a user to insert the main parameters of the problem, solve a specific instance, and show results graphically in real-time.

Benjamin Tee has long been captivated by a scene in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" where the surgical droid 2-1B replaces Luke Skywalker's hand after Darth Vader slices it off with a lightsaber in a battle on Cloud City. A fully autonomous robot surgeon is the Holy Grail--and many years off, says Dr. Tee, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the National University of Singapore. He and other researchers are developing devices that can perform surgical tasks with minimal human oversight. Dr. Tee's latest project is an "artificial skin" that would give robots a sense of touch, allowing them to do things like differentiate between healthy tissue and tumors and make surgical incisions. Other researchers are working on robots that stitch up incisions and navigate to repair organs.

Benjamin Tee has long been captivated by a scene in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" where the surgical droid 2-1B replaces Luke Skywalker's hand after Darth Vader slices it off with a lightsaber in a battle on Cloud City. A fully autonomous robot surgeon is the Holy Grail--and many years off, says Dr. Tee, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the National University of Singapore. He and other researchers are developing devices that can perform surgical tasks with minimal human oversight.