Before surgeons perform knee replacements, they need to know exactly how the patient’s knee is aligned. That means manually placing markers on an X-ray of the patient’s full leg from hip to ankle and measuring the precise angles that will guide the procedure. It’s a task that must be done for every patient, takes roughly 15 minutes each time and must be completed by a surgeon whose time is among the most expensive in medicine.
William Anderst, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery, School of Medicine, at the University of Pittsburgh, knew this was a problem that technology could solve. He brought it to the University of Pittsburgh Cloud Innovation Center (CIC), powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the result is an AI-powered tool that automatically identifies anatomical landmarks on knee X-rays and calculates the measurements surgeons need, with a mean error of less than one degree.
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