Health Rounds: AI tops surgeons in writing post-operative reports

Medicalgorithmics SA

13/02/2025 21:48

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    By Nancy Lapid
       Feb 13 (Reuters) - Hello, Health Rounds Readers! Today
we feature two more studies on ways that artificial intelligence
can potentially transform healthcare, including an improvement
in heart monitoring just in time for Valentine's Day. 
     
    AI writes better operative notes than surgeons
    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 that document the details of a
surgical procedure – are tedious to write and often contain
inaccuracies and incomplete information, researchers noted in a
report of the study 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 step of the operation – 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 in 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.

    AI beats humans at analyzing long-term heart monitor data
    AI is better than humans at analyzing long-term heart rhythm
monitoring, according to a large study. 
    The human heart beats up to 120,000 times a day, so
analyzing long-term electrocardiograms that may have recorded
every heartbeat for days or weeks is a time-consuming process,
researchers wrote in Nature Medicine.
    Using recordings from 14,606 patients who wore ECG devices
for an average of 14 days, the researchers first had the data
reviewed by human technicians using standard methods.
    They re-analyzed the data using an AI algorithm –
“DeepRhythmAI” – developed for the task by Polish company
MEDICALgorithmics  MGD.WA .
    Severe arrhythmias were missed in 4.4% of patients by the
human reviewers and in only 0.3% of patients by the AI.
    The AI model was able to rule out severe arrhythmia with
99.9% confidence in a 14-day ECG recording, according to the
report.
    Lack of trained staff to analyze so-called ambulatory ECGs
“leads to a huge bottleneck in healthcare worldwide, and at the
same time, patients would benefit if we did more and longer
ambulatory ECG recordings, not shorter,” study leader Linda
Johnson of Lund University in Sweden said in a statement.
    “We believe that AI could solve this problem.” 

 (Reporting by Nancy Lapid; editing by Bill Berkrot)
 ((Nancy.Lapid@thomsonreuters.com))