A Giant Step Forward for the Application of AI in Surgery

Although somewhat limited, the dream of autonomous actions in surgery is already here. In the process of surgical care, AI has the potential to improve surgeon performance, patient outcomes, and doctor–patient relations. Catering to this smart healthcare trend, Theator has leveraged Advantech’s medical-grade solution to realize the world’s first Surgical Intelligence Platform.

Smarter Surgical Decision-Making and Precision

Theator, a company dedicated to pioneering the surgical intelligence revolution with advanced AI, is creating a whole new practice of AI being used in surgery by integrating it into everyday surgical practices. Their vision is to leverage surgical intelligence to build a next-generation operating room with AI-driven, real time surgical decision making support in robotic and laparoscopic procedures.

Turning their vision into reality, Theator has assembled a team of leading surgeons, computer vision experts, clinical specialists, and software developers to develop advanced AI capabilities powered by computer vision to build a Surgical Intelligence Platform using real world scientific data. Surgical intelligence utilizes AI and video to scan video footage of real-world procedures, identifies critical moments, and annotates them with smart metatags. The result is an indexed library of fully annotated procedures along with individual and hospital wide analytics on surgical performance, giving surgeons unprecedented insight into how to improve their surgical performance, helping reduce unpredictability whilst improving accuracy and precision. For Theator to implement AI-powered solutions in hospitals, various support is needed from the industry. As a leading povider of certified medical computing systems and smart healthcare solutions, Advantech is naturally the ideal partnership choice for Theator, as Advantech has a wide range of off-the-shelf certified medical hardware platforms with high processing power for data acquisition and AI deployment.

Surgical Intelligence from a Medical-Grade Edge Computer

Addressing Theator’s operational requirements for its Surgical Intelligence Platform, Advantech introduced the USM-300—a compact medical-grade computer engineered for high-efficiency healthcare video workflows. Powered by a 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor, the USM-300 offers a flexible and scalable architecture tailored to real-time surgical environments, ensuring reliable data acquisition while meeting the requirements of medical environments.

Deployed as an edge computing system in the operating room, the USM-300 utilizes a 4K capture card to capture live surgical video directly from laparoscopic and endoscopic systems without introducing noticeable latency to the surgeon’s primary display monitor. Equipped with an NVIDIA RTX™ A1000 GPU, the system performs high-efficiency, real-time 4K video encoding and seamlessly manages local video streams within the OR environment.

Rather than processing heavy AI inferencing entirely at the edge, the USM-300 orchestrates the local data pipeline, logging essential metadata and securely transmitting the encrypted video stream directly to Theator’s AWS and Azure cloud infrastructure for advanced cloud-based surgical intelligence and post-operative analytics. This seamless edge-to-cloud synergy enables surgical teams to access comprehensive analytics and training resources—built on vast repositories of annotated procedural video—while maintaining an optimized, space-efficient hardware footprint in the operating room. 

As AI expands its footprint from databases to intraoperative video analysis in healthcare systems, the Surgical Intelligence Platform is playing a vital role in revolutionizing how surgery is taught and practiced. Through its collaboration with Advantech, Theator is taking a giant step forward in accelerating the application of AI in surgery.

Case Study Benefits

1. A compact, powerful, and scalable medical-grade computing solution for space-constrained endoscopy and laparoscopy towers.
2. The NVIDIA RTX™ A1000 GPU supports real-time 4K video encoding and efficient management of surgical video streams.

The USM-300 was integrated with Theator’s Surgical Intelligence Platform

Theator Surgical Intelligence Platform