Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to transform healthcare with applications in disease diagnosis, prognosis, personalized medicine, and education. The surgical landscape is poised to benefit significantly in terms of precision, accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. The applications of AI in optimizing surgical care extend to the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative phases. This will be relevant to all surgical specialities: neurosurgery, cardiothoracic, gastrointestinal, sarcoma, orthopaedic, plastic and vascular surgery. These include enabling telesurgery procedures, improving surgical navigation, and advancing surgical image and video analysis. Furthermore, AI demonstrates immense potential in transforming surgical education and training through enhanced video analysis, advanced surgical simulations, and robust skills assessment tools. As a result, there is growing interest in developing and implementing AI-based tools and methods in surgical care.

This special session aims to explore and identify key areas for rapid developments in AI for all types of surgical care (robotic, minimal access and open), encompassing its potential, diverse applications, and the practical challenges that lie ahead in integrating AI tools into clinical procedures. The session will bring together domain experts from computer science and clinical surgery to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue and share new and existing methods in AI for different surgical procedures. Participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas and build collaborations that will leave a lasting impact on both research and clinical practice in Surgical AI.

The scope of this special session includes a wide range of topics related to AI in surgical care. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Data and Model Development

  • Curating high-fidelity, open-access surgical datasets for AI training and validation.
  • Innovative methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning in surgical AI applications.
  • Development and application of foundation models for surgery.
  • Data augmentation techniques tailored for surgical scenarios.

Preoperative, Intraoperative, and Postoperative AI Applications

  • AI-powered decision support systems for preoperative planning and risk assessment.
  • Real-time AI for intraoperative surgical guidance and navigation.
  • AI in postoperative monitoring and outcome prediction.

Emerging Technologies and Innovations

  • Surgical Patient Digital Twins for personalized simulation and planning.
  • AI for robotic-assisted surgery, including teleoperated and autonomous systems.
  • Multimodal data fusion for enhanced surgical decision-making.
  • Advancements in AI-driven surgical simulation and training.

Surgical Video and Image Analysis

  • Sustainable AI solutions for surgical video processing and annotation.
  • AI for surgical skill assessment using video analytics.
  • Real-time segmentation and object detection in surgical images.

Collaboration and Integration

  • Human-AI collaboration in surgery to enhance collective intelligence.
  • Strategies for engaging clinicians in co-creating AI applications.
  • Challenges and solutions for integrating AI into clinical workflows.

Security, Ethics, and Trust

  • Secure and robust AI systems for surgical care.
  • Addressing ethical considerations and building trust in AI for surgery.
  • Ensuring regulatory compliance for AI-based surgical tools.

Evaluation and Validation

  • Benchmarking AI performance in surgical environments.
  • Clinical trials and real-world validation of AI tools.
  • Metrics and methodologies for evaluating AI in surgery.

Keywords

Robot assisted, minimal access and open surgery, Surgical Data Science, Endoscopy Vision, Medical AI, AI in Surgery, Medical Image Analysis, Generative AI.