Roger Hartl, MD

You know, I certainly, I mean, our practices, it's helpful for preoperative

Evaluation of patients, literature reviews.

If you're not sure about what's out there in the literature, AI is a huge advantage in that regard.

It can really help you review the literature very quickly, make certain decisions in terms of surgical procedures.

Obviously, you always got to double check.

The other thing that I use AI for increasingly in working with some of the companies who are involved in navigation and in intraoperative, you know, stereotactic navigation and robotics is the whole area of AI and, for example, automated segmentation.

Or, you know, I work with BrainLab, for example, to come up with a workflow

to use augmented reality through a microscope or exoscope to facilitate the workflow for MIS-T lift surgery, right?

MIS-T lift surgery is a great operation because there are certain landmarks that you use with every operation.

And using AI and using intraoperative or preoperative imaging, you can automatically have the software identify these landmarks and then indicate or highlight these landmarks while you're doing the operation.

And those landmarks become relevant at different parts of the surgery.

So you can literally then the AI have you guide through an operation from A to Z, depending on the landmarks when they become relevant.

That's one of those things that I'm working on that I'm very excited about that goes way beyond just putting screws into the spine.

This is really just facilitating the workflow.

And a T-LIF is a great example, but any spine operation could really be benefiting from this type of automatic segmentation and integration through microscope or the exoscope or even the endoscope, and then project this information into the visual field of the surgeon.

So that's AI in the operating room.

And then there's obviously AI that you can use for post-operative assessment, write manuscripts, I mean, help you in an intelligent way, improve the quality of your manuscript.

And I mean, there's so many, and then scribes, right?

We discuss it currently at ArcSpine, you know, is there a need for AI

scribes, for example.