How SDSC Uses AI to Transform Surgical Training and Practice - Ep. 241

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Our guest today is a machine learning and AI leader who's worked on projects ranging from sustainability and reforestation efforts to creating a virtual clothes swap platform for environmental family fashionistas. But for the past year and a half or so, she's been serving as director of machine learning at the nonprofit Surgical Data Science Collective, where she leads research focused on utilizing video data from surgeries to develop tools that can provide surgeons with immediate feedback and insights on their performance. Jessa recently gave a TEDx talk titled, why you want AI to watch your surgery, which I encourage you all to go check out on YouTube after you listen to our conversation. Because she's here right now to talk with us about the potential for AI to help surgeons bring better health care to everyone. Margo Mason Forsyth, welcome, and thank you so much for joining the NVIDIA AI podcast. Hi, Noah. Thanks for having me. Margo, maybe we can still do a little bit about your background. I alluded just a little bit in the intro. You've worked on various projects after studying machine learning and leveraging your skills and experience, for a lot of AI, for what we'd call AI for good projects, but really just in my view, projects that are helping, you know, improve quality of life for everyone. So maybe you can detail that a little bit and then, kind of bring up bring us up to the present with how you started got involved with the Surgical Data Science Collective. Yeah, sure. So like you said, I've been working in the AI field for for quite some time now. My first field of studies was computer science. So I've done enough software development, and then I realized that I wanted to do a bit more scientific projects. So went back to finish my master's and specialized in computer vision. Computer vision is something that I really, really love because I'm a very visual person. And so analyzing images and videos, is something that I'm pretty passionate about, I would say. And from that, I've worked on many different projects with very big video and image files. So like you said, I've worked on several projects that go from analyzing, lumber scanning, for example, to satellite imagery to detect deforestation or now surgical videos. So it's been it's been quite a ride for sure. And I've learned a lot mostly on how to productorize AI and how we can use AI to make an impact in the world and have a focus on is it actually gonna be useful, you know, and and make a difference at some point. So I that's kind of how I see my my career so far. Have you found that the projects you've been drawn to, has it been kind of being drawn to the next sort of technical or scientific challenge kind of …