Using artificial intelligence, computers can watch surgeons perform operations and then write post-surgical operative notes that are more accurate than what the doctors themselves would have written, a new study suggests.
Operative notes – reports documenting the details of a surgical procedure – are tedious to write and often contain inaccuracies and incomplete information, researchers noted in a study report in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
Operative reports “not only facilitate communication between healthcare providers, but also serve as the basis for surgical billing and coding, are used for surgical quality benchmarking, enable surgical research efforts, and track compliance with regulatory requirements and evidence-based guidelines," the researchers wrote. "(They) are arguably the single most important document in all of surgery.”
Using AI technology, researchers trained computer-vision systems to detect surgeons’ actions in videos of robotic-assisted operations to remove the prostate.
For each possible operation step – for example, lymph node removal, tying off veins, or cutting through the urethra – the researchers pre-wrote descriptive text. As the AI system “watched” the video, it detected the surgeon’s steps and compiled the text into a narrative operative report.
When the researchers tested the system using videos of 158 real-world cases, 53% of reports written by the surgeons contained discrepancies, compared with 29% of AI reports, as determined by an expert team of reviewers.
Significant discrepancies with actions recorded in the videos that could potentially matter to the patient’s subsequent care were found in 27% of surgeons’ reports and 13% of AI reports.
With further testing, the new technology has the potential “to reduce documentation burden, improve operative report accuracy, promote surgical transparency, and decrease subjectivity in surgical documentation,” the researchers said.