Theator, which provides an AI and computer vision powered Surgical Intelligence platform that helps improve surgeon performance, announced a new partnership with The Academy for Surgical Coaching – a nonprofit organization that equips surgeons with annotation and video analytics tools to better learn, review, and evaluate surgical performance. This technology helps surgeons to better learn from past surgeries as well as provide feedback and review to others for the sake of creating better surgeons.
"At the Academy for Surgical Coaching, we seek partners that can help us achieve our mission of empowering surgeons through surgical coaching to improve their performance and patient care in the operating room," said Jason C. Pradarelli, MD, MS, Medical Director of The Academy for Surgical Coaching. "We expect a productive collaboration with Theator, leveraging its AI-powered Surgical Intelligence platform to make surgical coaching more efficient, scalable, and valuable for surgeons."
These days, surgeons are held to extremely busy schedules, leaving them with very little time to provide much-needed guidance and training to trainees. If this sounds like bad practice, then wait until I tell you that these same surgeons rarely, if ever, get a chance to review their own key moments from past surgeries, let alone providing an education safety net for other practicing surgeons. Just like in the world of sports, athletes use video from practices and games along with guidance from experienced coaches to better improve their play. So, should be done in an industry that literally dances on the edge of death and life, with one surgical mistake potentially costing millions in lawsuits as well as the tragic potential of loss of life.
This insight becomes extremely valuable and necessary for surgeons to not just depend on personal past experience. This is where Theator’s unique tool comes into play by leveraging AI and computer vision to provide even the best surgeons with some data-driven assistance. The company’s platform enables surgeons to gain deep scientific insight into their own performance and those of surgeons worldwide. By extracting and annotating every key moment from real-world surgical procedures, the platform improves surgeon performance from every angle - pre-operative preparation and post-operative analysis and debrief - and enables deeper department-wide visibility: raising standards and performance across surgical departments. Now, Theator's collaboration with the Academy for Surgical Coaching brings the Academy's esteemed peer surgical coaching to the platform.
Of course, COVID has caused even more setbacks in peer-to-peer coaching for surgeons, something that had already began to see a drop off even before the pandemic outbreak. As yet another video-based solution, Theator’s platform is another digital advancement aimed at replacing the previously in-person teaching system with one that can be done remotely.
"Surgical coaching is proven to enhance surgeons' performance in the operating room," said Dr. Tamir Wolf Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder of Theator along with CTO Dotan Asselmann. "Nevertheless, in recent years, and especially during this pandemic, face-to-face coaching has been neither feasible nor most effective. That's why we're excited to partner with the experts at the Academy for Surgical Coaching to enable continuous learning, self-evaluation, and peer-to-peer coaching through our surgical intelligence video-based platform."
