The Doctor’s Advocate | Second Quarter 2024
Foundation News

Spotlight on Foundation Grants: Using AI to Assess Cataract Surgery Performance

The Doctors Company Foundation supported a project in 2021 by the University of Michigan W.K. Kellogg Eye Center to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) system for assessing surgical competency in cataract surgery through automated analysis of surgical video recordings. The project team collected and annotated a large dataset of cataract surgery videos and used it to train machine learning models to identify and track instruments, phases of surgery, and metrics of surgical performance.

As Project Lead Nambi Nallasamy, MD, noted, “Applying machine learning and AI to cataract surgical videos provides a unique opportunity to design new evaluation tools that not only measure a surgeon’s skill level, but can also inform future surgical instruction.”

Learn more about this project and the Foundation’s work to fund patient safety research, education, and training.


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The guidelines suggested in this newsletter are not rules, do not constitute legal advice, and do not ensure a successful outcome. They attempt to define principles of practice for providing appropriate care. The principles are not inclusive of all proper methods of care nor exclusive of other methods reasonably directed at obtaining the same results.

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