By Meir Marmor, MD
During the 2023 OTA annual meeting in Seattle, the OTA launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Task Force. Recognizing the profound changes that AI and emerging digital technologies are having on the entire medical profession, the OTA BOD has decided to put in place a task force that will assess the implementations of AI in orthopaedic trauma and make recommendations to the BOD and Strategic Research Initiative (SRI) Committee on appraisal of these technologies and their evidence-based adoption for the benefit of OTA members and the patients that they care for.
Specific tasks for the task force include making recommendation on:
- Implementing AI models to enhance the OTA website and app, focusing on member needs.
- OTA sponsorship/endorsement for AI-driven projects in clinical, educational, and research domains.
- Legal aspects of using AI models in orthopaedic trauma, particularly in relation to treatment recommendations.
- Developing a white paper on the integration of AI into orthopaedic trauma clinical practice.
The OTA AITF membership includes orthopaedic trauma surgeons that are members the OTA leadership, AI experts from academia and industry, and European experts in AI development and deployment, some of which are also orthopaedic traumatologists. The full membership list is as follows:
|
Meir Marmor |
chair |
|
Saam Morshed |
OTA member |
|
Clay Spitler |
OTA member |
|
Steve Warner |
OTA member |
|
Tom Peterson |
USA academic advisor |
|
Jacobien Oosterhoff |
international academic advisor |
|
Job Doornberg |
international academic advisor |
|
Max Gordon |
international academic advisor |
|
Andrew Rabinovich |
industry advisor (Headroom) |
|
Justin Krogue |
industry advisor (Google Health) |
Since its formation, the task force has convened twice and elected to concentrate on two principal projects that encapsulate the committee's objectives:
- A platform that enables OTA to host, sponsor, and endorse AI applications in four key areas: Diagnostics, Rare Disease Identification, Natural Language Processing, and Surgical Assistance.
- The procurment of extensive, high-quality datasets, aimed at attracting AI developers to focus on orthopaedic trauma applications.
Currently, the task force is holding monthly meetings and is actively engaged in formulating detailed recommendations for the rollout of these projects.