During a procedure in which a misstep of just a millimetre can cause death or severe damage, clinicians used technology to help analyse video of their work in real time
A London NHS trust claims to have performed the world’s first brain operation using artificial intelligence tools to help support the work of surgeons.
University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust recently removed a pituitary brain tumour from 48-year-old Rhys Hibbert. During the operation, surgeons were assisted by AI technology developed by the trust’s academic partner organisation: University College London (UCL).
The system “analysed the live surgical video feed in real time, rather than using pre-surgery scans, to help the surgical team make more precise decisions by highlighting critical structures at the base of the brain”, according to UCL.
Academics at the university’s Hawkes Institute developed the tool, which was “trained and evaluated… using a large collection of annotated endoscopic pituitary surgery videos from previous operations”.
Before being deployed in a live surgical setting, the AI function – which is underpinned by the NVIDIA Clara IGX platform – had previously been used to help train surgeons.
Now two UCLH clinicians – Professor Hani Marcus, supported by Danyal Khan – have put the technology into practice, by using it to help guide their work during a procedure in which “going a millimetre wrong can make a critical difference and lead to death, blindness or stroke”, according to UCL, which added that “the AI supported the surgical team helping identify risky areas to avoid while removing as much tumour as safely possible”.
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Going forward, the technology could also be used to help “to track surgical instruments and instrument–tissue interactions, with the aim of supporting surgeons during complex procedures and providing feedback”, academics believe.
The patient volunteered to take part in the procedure, which took place at the UCLH-based National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery as part of a research programme backed by government funding and extra financial assistance from Google.
“The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery was founded in 1859… and was the world’s first dedicated neurosurgical hospital,” Hibbert said. “So, to me, it seems very fitting that the same hospital should also be the world’s first to carry out an AI‑assisted neurosurgery. I’m very pleased to have had the opportunity to be cared for in the hospital… I’m also very humbled to have been asked if I’ll be prepared to be the world’s first patient in this research.”
Dr Sophia Bano, associate professor in robotics and AI at the UCL Hawkes Institute, added: “This AI system was developed by a multidisciplinary team at UCL. By learning from hundreds of surgical videos, it has been exposed to a breadth of surgical examples that would take a surgeon many years to encounter. It is designed to help recognise critical anatomy, surgical instruments and tissue interactions in real time, supporting the surgeon during highly delicate procedures.”