Surgeons at Northumbria Healthcare are using AI "and hundreds of data points" to predict if patients are more or less likely to have complications after hip or knee ops.
Dr Justin Green and Professor Mike Reed have developed their own artificial intelligence model which creates a "personalised risk assessment" for patients ahead of surgery. The NHS Trust carries out more than 3,000 such procedures a year - and the new technology helps medics decide how to manage a patient's op and where it needs to take place.
Prof Reed said: “When I see a patient in clinic, they look me in the eye and ask, ‘Will I be all right?’ It’s very difficult to predict that, and I end up giving a fairly general answer. I hope this technology will give me a better indication about what was going to happen to those people."
Dr Green and Prof Reed think their tool can be applied across healthcare. "I think this will be transformational for predicting surgery outcomes and risk," Prof Reed continued. "This is just the start and there will be lots of areas we can look at, right across healthcare. It doesn’t need to be in orthopaedics. The concept we’ve developed is completely transferable to predict risk from any surgery."
He said other NHS trusts around the country had been in touch as the health service looks for creative ways to tackle the huge backlogs of planned procedures - there are well over six and a half million people currently waiting for care.
Dr Green added that complications following surgery were "a bad result" adding: "It’s costly to the patient, it’s costly to the NHS, it can take time and it can stop someone else having an operation. It has a massive impact on the health system as a whole.
"Currently, we might give them a generalized risk score that says, ‘You tick these three criteria, therefore your risk of an unsuccessful operation is 7%, as opposed to the national 2%.’ There’s nothing personalized about that,” Green says. “As a patient, all I know is that I’ve got three ticks in seven boxes, my risk is a little bit high and I can do absolutely nothing about that. So, I might decide not to have the operation.
"Now, we can show them in very granular detail how the AI model behind that prediction is coming up with its result that’s based on hundreds of data points such as age, blood parameters, body mass index and previous medical history."
The new programme uses Microsoft Azure technology to provide assurance that the AI is acting correctly. Sarah Bird from the tech giant leads the responsible and ethical development of the AI. She said technology called its "responsible AI dashboard" was key, adding: "[It's] really handy for a sector like healthcare, which has to make sure there aren’t significant errors in your AI model and why it’s making a particular decision. The tools allow teams to govern their AI more effectively and help them use it responsibly.”
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