Doctors use artificial intelligence to receive better training and diagnose diseases in early stages. (Credit: Ivanhoe Newswire) The future is now. Artificial intelligence has allowed physicians to receive better training and diagnose diseases in early stages. Now it’s newest use can give patients more control over their surgery outcomes. Hip surgery outcomes For 33-year-old Meredith Goode, running is her passion. Meredith said “I have done a ton of half marathons and marathons. I was into ultra-running, super into triathlons.” But when she was training for a hundred-mile race, she noticed something didn’t feel right. She said, “I was just experiencing some groin pain and some really shooting pain down my left leg and into my back.” An MRI revealed it was a labral tear, which is an injury to the tissue that holds the ball and socket parts of the hip together. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Shane Nho from Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush University Medical Center explains “The thing that bothers most patients the most is they can’t do the activities that they typically do.” Doctor Nho recommended Goode have hip surgery and before the surgery he was able to predict the likelihood Goode would be able to get back to her level of fitness after surgery by using a machine learning algorithm. Doctor Nho and his team based the algorithm on a database with information collected from patients before and after surgery that contains age, surgical history, level of activity and the patient’s reported outcomes. Doctor Nho says, “Having this data and this algorithm, we’re able to basically calculate it to give the patient a percent of likelihood of achieving a significant improvement in terms of overall outcomes.” Having that information placed Goode’s mind at ease. She says “I wasn’t sure if the surgery would kind of impact what I had been doing, would impact my strength. Knowing his confidence gave me more confidence that it would be a success.” And it was. Goode was pain-free and running six months after surgery. A year later, she was ready to run again in marathons. Using AI to go the distance. Right now, this algorithm is only applicable to a certain type of hip surgery, which is hip arthroscopy. However, Dr Nho says he is looking to roll the algorithm out in other procedures.