A-STAR Lab Teaches Hands-On Computer Vision at the ACS Clinical Congress 2026

The A-STAR Lab contributed to "AI Skills: What Can I Do Now and What's Coming in the Future?" at the 2026 American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in Washington, DC, an afternoon course in which participants built and trained their own AI tools rather than only hearing about them.

Dr. Simon J. Laplante opened the course's introductory talks with "What AI sees in surgical video," covering what AI can read from surgical video and how that supports intraoperative understanding.

Later in the afternoon, Dr. Laplante led the computer vision session alongside a faculty team of Santosh Iyer (Moonshot AI), Chloe Nobuhara (Stanford University), Dr. Abdulrahman Alomar, and Dr. Reza Shahriarirad. Participants learned what computer vision is and how surgical AI models are trained, then annotated laparoscopic cholecystectomy frames themselves, labeling anatomy and instruments in teams.

Each team's annotations were used to train a model during the course. At the end of the afternoon the resulting models were shown side by side, giving participants a direct look at how the quality of their own labels shaped what the AI learned to see.