Prakash Gatta MD FACS is a Board Certified & Fellowship trained Esophageal Surgeon that completed his fellowship training at the prestigious Oregon Clinic under Dr Lee Swanstrom in 2007. Since then he created the first Esophageal Surgery Service at the University of Cincinnati at his first academic appointment. After moving back to the Seattle area in 2010 he has created amongst the largest Robotic Foregut Surgery programs in the US at MultiCare Health System with the collaboration of local and regional clinical leaders and partners. Dr Gatta has pioneers technology driven delivery of surgical techniques including starting the first Single Site Surgery program (minimally invasive surgery via one small incision) in Washington State. His research interest encompasses developing new surgical instrumentation, creation of new intellectual property in this space and particularly (more recently) in the field of Artificial Intelligence with Robotic/Digital Surgery platforms. Specific areas of interest include predictive analytics, machine learning and surgical automation. He is a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) with several industry partners (including Intuitive Surgical, Verb Surgical, BD, CSATS, Ethicon and J&J). Dr Gatta serves as a co-director of MultiCare’s Minimally Invasive Surgery Fellowship program. He is an active participant in several surgical societies (AFS, SAGES, ACS) where he occupies a leading teaching role in mentoring other surgeons in both Robotic, Foregut and Minimally Invasive Surgery. He continues to give back the surgical community by establishing new training pathways, teaching courses, establishing one of the only Robotic MIS fellowships in the country. He holds academic appointments at the University of Washington and at AT Still University. Dr Gatta was raised in Kuwait and graduated from Medical School with Honors at Seth G.S. Medical College (University of Bombay) that has an excellent academic pedigree with a right history of success and is amongst the top 3 schools in India consistently. As a recent survivor of Covid-19 he has gained national prominence given his “remarkable life arc” where he (with the incredible support of his wife and children) was able to overcome the challenges of being a former refugee, an immigrant, going through medical school and the challenges of entry into and the completion of Surgical Residency and Fellowship training in addition to overcoming the affects of this pandemic.

Over the last 18 months there has been a confluence of two major and erstwhile separate technologies. Artificial intelligence (or augmented Intelligence) and Robotics (or digital surgery). Do you acceleration of processing power and cloud computing these two are intersecting and creating a whole new line of business. The solution it provides is to improve surgical outcomes and reduce complications in cost. This will be the ultimate safety guide for surgery in the future. The talk will cover where we are and where we are going