James Mooney, MD, spent seven years training in neurosurgery and another year specializing in minimally invasive and complex spine deformity surgery.
The most difficult part of the job, he said, is not the operation. It is deciding who should have one. “Decision-making is definitely the hardest part of the process,” Dr. Mooney, a neurosurgeon at VCU Health in Richmond, Va., told Becker’s. “Who to operate on and when is vastly more important to outcomes than executing a technically perfect surgery.”
That is the problem he believes AI could eventually help spine surgery solve. The opportunity is not to replace surgeon judgment with an algorithm. It is to give surgeons and patients a more complete picture of what is likely to happen before they commit to an operation, drawing from imaging, bone quality, muscle quality, comorbidities, postoperative outcomes and even patients who never undergo surgery…