- AI College of Medicine Faculty News Research
A student engineering project that began with using artificial intelligence (AI) to track cafeteria forks transformed into a system that will help Orlando Health surgeons perform robotic surgeries more efficiently.
Dr. Laura Brattain, a UCF biomedical engineer, mentored six College of Engineering and Computer Science seniors, who developed the AIMS (AI for Medical Surgery) system that keeps track of surgical staples, enabling surgical teams to operate more efficiently, reduce waste and improve sustainability. The new technology was developed as part of the college’s Senior Design capstone course that encourages students to create a usable product before they graduate.
Students built an end-to-end application and tested it in an operating room at Orlando Health several times to improve the application. Dr. Alexis Sanchez, robotic surgery program director at Orlando Health Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC), participated in the project and is now using the system in his surgeries.
As Florida’s Premier Engineering and Technology University, UCF is focused on leveraging technology to strengthen the health of communities. That is Dr. Brittain’s research focus — integrating biomedical AI, medical ultrasound and surgical robotics to create healthcare innovations that improve care. An associate professor at UCF’s College of Medicine and a faculty member of the UCF AI Initiative, she holds secondary positions in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.
Dr. Sanchez says the technology can be applied to many other processes in the future, such as keeping track of instrument usage during non-robotic surgeries.
“We work in a very fast-paced environment, so having this to be able to detect waste has incredible potential to improve both efficiency and sustainability,” he says. “This is just the beginning. And this collaboration underscores both Orlando Health and UCF’s commitment to innovation to improve healthcare for our community.”
How the System Works
Many of the new medical tools developed for the operating room are disposable. Once they have been removed from their sterile containers and placed on the operating room table, they must be discarded — even if unused — because they are no longer considered sterile. During robotic surgeries, the robot cuts and staples tissues at the same time to reduce bleeding. But no one is sure how many staples a particular surgery will take.
During a visit to the hospital, Dr. Brattain joined Dr. Sanchez in observing the entire process of performing a robotic surgery, from preparation to completion. After evaluating potential areas for improvement, they suggested that students develop an AI system to track how many staples are placed on the surgical table versus how many are actually used.
“I wanted the students to know that while they can all create a computer program, they can also make an impact in healthcare,” she says. “To avoid developing technologies that end up collecting dust on the shelf, we should work with clinical experts to solve problems that can ultimately improve the care of patients.”
AIMS has a camera feed linked to a computer in the operating room. During surgery, their AI software directs the camera to record each staple that comes into the operating room and track its use. That data can then be analyzed to determine exactly how many staples are used to avoid opening unnecessary staples for surgery.
Life in the real world of surgery offered unique challenges to the young scientists. They went through multiple iterations with Sanchez and his team at Orlando Health. Initially they didn’t account for the low light conditions in operating rooms, so they had to change the camera’s angles and settings to better capture photos of the staples. They had to address other issues: What happened if someone placed a tool in front of the staples during surgery? What happened if someone moved the staples or stepped in front of the camera?
“We are thankful that Dr. Sanchez and his team provided the students with the opportunities to test AIMS in real-world scenarios where a regular robotic procedure is happening in the operating room and the medical team is moving around as usual,” Dr. Brattain says. “You can’t imagine these things in a classroom. Students need to see their science through a medical provider’s eyes.”
Creating Real-World Technologies
The goal of the Senior Design capstone is to “give students the opportunity to say, ‘I actually made something,’” during their education, says Dr. Matthew Gerber, a faculty member who helps lead the module. “We love it when the project turns into an application that’s being used in the real world. We wish it would happen more often.”
To further engineering-medicine partnerships, Dr. Brattain offered an Introduction to Medical Robotics course to engineering majors this semester — the first time the course has been offered in a decade. Students learned about how medical robots are designed and manipulated. As part of the class, they visited Dr. Sanchez’s team and saw the hospital’s Da Vinci robot in action. Students had a unique chance to interact with robotic surgeons, who have been generous with sharing their knowledge and answering questions. All these visits were coordinated by Lillian Aguirre, a clinical nurse specialist on Sanchez’s team and a UCF College of Nursing alum. The students and Dr. Brattain are grateful for her dedicated assistance.
Dr. Sanchez was at UCF when the students presented their Senior Design project and says he was proud of what they had accomplished together.
“One of the students came up to me and there were tears in his eyes,” Dr. Sanchez says. “He said, ‘I always hoped my skills would help humanity one day, and now I have.’”
Dr. Gerber sees plenty of future opportunities to create UCF engineering-medicine systems that impact patient care.
“Doctors are faced with so much information,” he says. “With AI, we can quickly and objectively analyze all that information to help give doctors better, cleaner information. AI can say to doctors, ‘Don’t worry about that. Focus on this.’”
Orlando Health is a UCF Pegasus Partner, a program that offers opportunities for select partners to engage across the university in ways that create meaningful value for both organizations. That engagement includes talent development and recruitment, shared research projects, joint ventures and collaborations, and strategic philanthropy.
Working together on projects like this creates synergy and provides the potential for advances in the science of medicine in Central Florida.
Rachel Leiner ’25, who graduated from UCF this spring, was the student leader for the AI project.
“Coming into a project that’s for a grade and seeing that we made something that can help improve the hospital workflow makes me very proud,” she says. “We started this project by developing AI to track cafeteria forks. We had nothing, and in four months we had a working software app and a usable AI model to track surgical staples in an operating room.”
The other UCF students who created the AI project are: Nicholas Aristizabal, Hunter Herbst, Trever Jones, Jacob McKiernan and Gabriel Rechdan.
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- AI in Medicine Medical-engineering partnerships Orlando Health