UMC El Paso using Artificial Intelligence to aid in colonoscopies

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) - Inside an operating room at University Medical Center's Surgical Center, there is a blue box that's no bigger than your home DVR. It's artificial intelligence. 

Doctors at UMC are using it to during a colonoscopy, an exam that looks for changes, such as swollen, irritated tissues, polyps or cancer in the colon and rectum.

The National Cancer Institute says studies have shown that colonoscopies reduce deaths from colorectal cancer by 60 to 70%

When you add artificial intelligence?

"It's like having an expert colonoscopist along with me to look at the colon. At the same time, they are not distracted. It's the machine basically doing nothing but looking at the lining of the colon and highlighting areas of interest that I may or may not have detected," says Dr Carmela Morales, the only female gastroentorologist in the city of El Paso.  

"It provides a little beep, a little tone, and it'll flash a little green box in over an area of interest. And that allows me to say, oh, I didn't really see much there. Let me focus in to that area and then you'll see a very tiny polyp and then I use my other instruments and say, okay, let's go ahead and take that out," said Dr. Morales.

According to the Mayo Clinic: doctors from around the world found that using artificial intelligence in colonoscopies reduced the number of suspicious polyps they missed by 50%. 

Dr. Morales said the technology is going to be transformative. "I think this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of using artificial intelligence for G-I type procedures," she said.

Watch the full report on AI in colonoscopies Thursday night, only on ABC-7 at 10.