Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Doctors in London have just pulled off a medical first: performing brain surgery with the help of AI watching over their shoulder in real time, and the man who agreed to be patient zero says it gave him his life back.
Rhys Hibbert, a 48-year-old father of two from Bedfordshire, had an 11mm tumour growing on his pituitary gland, a tiny hormone-producing organ tucked right at the base of the skull, sitting dangerously close to the arteries that feed the brain and the nerves that control vision. His condition was discovered by chance in December 2024, when he collapsed and suffered a seizure during his usual daily walk. As the tumour grew, it began pressing on his optic nerves, gradually stealing his peripheral vision. “I began using walking sticks after repeatedly tripping because I couldn’t see the lower field of vision,” he later said, as reported by UCL News.
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Removing a tumour in that neighbourhood is a bit like performing surgery in a crowded elevator blindfolded, everything important is packed together, and a millimetre in the wrong direction can mean blindness, a stroke, or worse. That’s exactly the kind of risk surgeons at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery were trying to reduce when they brought AI into the operating theatre for the first time on a live patient, as part of a UCL-UCLH collaboration.
An AI watching every move
During the operation, surgeons inserted a thin camera through Hibbert’s nose to reach the tumour, which sat hidden behind bone and tissue. Rather than relying only on scans taken before surgery, a UCL-developed AI system analysed the live surgical video feed in real time, highlighting critical structures so the surgical team could make more precise decisions on the spot.
Dr Sophia Bano, the system’s technical lead at UCL, said the AI had been exposed to a breadth of surgical examples that would take a surgeon many years to encounter. She explained that the system was designed to recognise critical anatomy, surgical instruments and interactions between tissue during delicate procedures.
The surgeons remained fully in control throughout the operation, using the AI more like an unusually well-read colleague peeking over their shoulder. Professor Hani Marcus, who performed the surgery alongside UCL PhD candidate Danyal Khan, thanked the trial participants and the wider team for taking what he described as an important first step globally. He also highlighted the use of UK-developed AI as a way to potentially reduce risks during delicate surgeries.
The results appear encouraging. Hibbert said he could see everything in the room clearly when he woke up after surgery. Within a week, he was walking unaided without glasses or sticks.
He described the improvement as feeling like having a 360-degree panoramic view of everything around him, something he had not experienced in more than a year. Given how close the tumour had been to his optic nerves, Hibbert acknowledged that there was always a risk of coming out of surgery with worse vision, but said his improved eyesight was evidence of how accurately the surgical team had operated.
The AI system was built at the UCL Hawkes Institute and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research and Google. Researchers are now working toward a larger trial, hoping this quiet collaboration between surgeon and machine becomes a regular part of operating rooms everywhere.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
