Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to train brain surgeons to perform critical operations more effectively and safely, according to the UK's National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN).

The system, under development at University College London (UCL), highlights sensitive or critical structures in the brain, to bring them to the surgeon’s attention.

“What we're really trying to do is apply AI or artificial intelligence to support surgeons doing brain tumor surgery at the base of the brain,” Hani Marcus, Deputy Director of Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, told Reuters.

Brain surgery is always conducted with a real-time video feed from the point of surgery.

That video feed is now processed by the AI and augmented in a way that helps the surgeon understand what they are seeing.

“Even as a consultant, there's scope to further improve the quality of the surgery by having this extra AI assistance," Marcus said.

The AI system analyzed video of more than 200 pituitary gland tumor operations, and accumulated approximately 10 years-worth of experience in a fraction of the time, according to Marcus.

That knowledge means the AI can now not only help navigate to the correct area of the brain but also knows what should be happening at any stage of the procedure, making it a valuable training aid, according to Danyal Khan, a trainee neurosurgeon who is also an AI research Fellow at UCL and has been involved in developing the software that is now helping him.

"Having that sort of assistant in the background as a reassurance to look at and say, 'well, yeah, actually, at this stage, out of the hundreds of videos of experts that this algorithm has watched, the experts would probably start moving on to the next phase'. It's a useful double check," Khan told Reuters.

The system could be in use in operating theatres with two years, according to UCL. — Report from Reuters