Frank D. Vrionis, M.D., M.P.H., PhD, Chief of Neurosurgery at the Marcus Neuroscience Institute
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This is Carly Beam with the Becker Spine and Orthopedics Podcast. And today I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Frank Varonis, Chief of Neurosurgery at the Marcus Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Varonis, thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you, Carly. Pleasure to be here.
And so, Dr. Varonis, before we dive into questions, can you introduce yourself and share more about your background?
Sure. So I'm Frank Vironis. I'm a neurosurgeon. I have been practicing for many years. I did my medical school in Athens, Greece, my Master of Public Health at Harvard, my PhD at Duke, and my residency in neurosurgery at Tufts Medical Center. Prior to Coming here to Boca Raton, I was for 16 years at USF and Moffitt Cancer Center, where I also served as chief of neurosurgery. That's in a nutshell. my synopsis of my life so far.
It's a great, impressive background you have. It looks like just from all over the world as well. And, you know, I'm wondering, Dr. Varonis, what are the top three trends that you're following in healthcare today?
What is Dr. Frank Varonis's background and experience in neurosurgery?
Yeah, certainly, I mean, I'm interested in health care as a general rule. But in particular, things that can help with the efficiency of delivery of the health care, such as AI, that's one thing. Also, technology, innovations, and also research. There are some of the things that I would be interested in and the strengths and the weaknesses of the system. As you know, there's no healthcare system that's perfect, so it's important to try, even in small ways, to improve on the current one.
Absolutely. You touched on some really big things going on here. You mentioned healthcare delivery, AI and research. I wanted to hone in a bit. I'd love to hear how you're using AI in your practice. I know a lot of spine surgeons I've talked to, they've shared just the various ways it's helped them both in the clinical office setting with surgery itself. I'd love to hear your perspective.
In AEI, from my perspective, right now it's only a research tool. We've developed an AEI software that applies to spine so that, for example, if... Somebody, we can enter somebody's CAT scan or MRI in the system and then the AI can deliver for us a computer model of somebody's spine and then we can potentially ask questions from a biomechanical standpoint, like if we do this intervention, what will happen to the spine and so on and so forth. So from a research standpoint, that's more or less what I have. I have been involved as far as AI is concerned. But I can see that AI has a lot of other applications, potentially in medicine. We see AI reading CAT scans sometimes or getting warnings about somebody's CAT scans.
And I think there's also a lot of potential applications of AI, not just in data analytics, but also in responses to patients' questions and so on and so forth.
Definitely. That's really interesting what you're saying about research. What do you predict? How much will AI grow in the research realm, are you expecting?
But, you know, I think it will grow to some degree. Now, how exactly it's going to work and, you know, and how AI is going to be coordinated and so on is difficult really to predict. But, for example, to give you some examples, idea. We get, you know, health professionals get thousands of phone calls a day. You have to have people answering the phone. A lot of the questions, like 80% of the questions are routine, and potentially AI can answer those questions. So you can have something automated, whatever, and answer those questions and only reserve a face-to-face, so to speak, or a person-to-person response for the 10, 20% of the questions that they really need somebody who knows more about things.
So just a very, you know, just an idea, so to speak. I see also AI being, I think already is applied in terms of you know, billing or scheduling or many times for insurance companies as far as deem as to whether a service is appropriate or not appropriate. AI has the potential to analyze very quickly a lot of data and respond to things much faster than a human can.
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