Next Generation Surgeons

Editorial
Next Generation Surgeons -
Surgery as a discipline has progressed tremendously over the last century. It remains an ever evolving field of medicine continuously achieving new milestones. Even William Halstead considered as one of the founder members of the modern surgical practice had quoted that the future of surgery is not what it used to be. The implication of course, is that the future of this art cannot be judged. Although many factors such as economics, managed care and regulations have contributed to the changing landscape, the introduction of the revolutionary technology has brought a dramatic change in the field of surgery. The change is in fact so rapid that a new term, disruptive technology coined by Richard M Satava,

The current trainees involved in surgical residencies are the part of the Generation Y,(also known as millennials). These students were born in the late 1980s to 2000. Millennials are essentially the children of Baby boomers (born from 1940s to 1960s) and grew up with cultural event of cross border terrorism, smart phones and social networking. This group is skilled, comfortable with technology and very self confident. Although suggested to have adolescent behaviors with lack of independent judgment they are accustomed to have frequent evaluations and hence have clearly set goals for their future. With the information readily available with the click of a mouse and they demand instant results. Their expectations with availability and usefulness of technology are insatiable. They believe in team effort and value being connected to others. In contrast of the Millennials, the generations involved in teaching these residents are either a part of the Baby Boomer Generation or Generation X (1960s – 1980s). Baby boomers had been impacted by introduction of television, space race and civil rights and have typical characteristics defined as being competitive, optimistic, consumeristic, and that they live for work. On the other side Gen X has been dubbed as being cynical, skeptical and pessimistic. The “Me generation” is known to be self motivated, independent and

Surgery itself would become a form of information management leading to integration of surgical techniques like never before. By performing the data fusions of the CT scan (the eye of the information space) to the real video image, it would be possible to have an intra-operative navigational aid for image guided surgery on a computer generated virtual console, where the human body itself is nothing but a piece of information on which the surgeon is “editing”, assessing each step a million different ways in a fraction of second before it is actually performed. Imagine being able to zoom into the organs microscopic image before we actually make the cut, a feat to savor at the moment that would be our successor’s finger