“In high stakes environments such as robotic surgery, it is not realistic for AI to replace human surgeons in the short term,” says Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and senior author of the studies. “Instead, we asked how AI can safely improve surgical outcomes for the patients, and hence, our focus on making human surgeons better and more effective through AI.
“SAIS has the potential to provide surgeon feedback that is accurate, consistent, and scalable,” says Dani Kiyasseh, lead author of the studies, a former postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and now a senior AI engineer at Vicarious Surgical. The hope, according to the researchers, is for SAIS to provide surgeons with guidance on what skill sets need to be improved.
“We were able to show that such AI-based explanations often align with explanations that surgeons would have otherwise provided,” Kiyasseh says. “Reliable AI-based explanations can pave the way for providing feedback when peer surgeons are not immediately available.”