Distinguished Lecture "AI and the Future of Sports Medicine and Bioengineering" by Professor Savio L-Y. WOO

Abstract

Purpose: To date, the words AI has the highest worldwide search frequency – almost twice that of ‘OK’ and ‘Love’ and over four times that of ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ – and continues to trend exponentially upwards. The growth of the AI industry has mirrored this rapid rise. For those of us engaged in sports science, technology, and medicine, we have also found it necessary to learn, to understand, and to integrate AI into our daily activities. Thus, it is timely to share what this lecturer has studied and learned with you!

Background: In 2020, it was said that new medical knowledge was doubling every 73 days! As such, generative AI (GenAI) became well suited to harvest this voluminous amount of data, together with its intelligent algorithms and phenomenal speed of floating-point calculation (upwards of 1012 to 1015 per second or teraflops and petaflops, respectively) to digest these findings, to generate new ideas, and to reach better solutions. Neural Network models and Large Language models are currently used by many large companies (ChatGPT, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Gemini, Llama, and so on) for deep learning and training tasks.

Content: This lecture will cover how AI will revolutionize many areas of sports, bioengineering and medicine. Specifically, ACL and ACL reconstruction will be used to demonstrate how a systematic, sound engineering analyses together with rigorous laboratory and clinical data, and the help of AI could lead to better management decisions to improve patient outcome.

Outlook: In a GenAI, Agentic AI and Technical (Robotic) AI dominated world, there will be numerous challenges and concerns on societal transformation. This lecturer has chosen to present a more optimistic outlook on what AIs will bring based on his experience and acquired philosophy of life!

About the speaker

Professor Savio L-Y. WOO
Ph.D., D.Sc., D.Eng.
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus
University of Pittsburgh, U.S.A.

Professor Woo is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. After a 20-year tenure at the University of California in San Diego, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh and founded the world-renowned Musculoskeletal Research Center (MSRC) for diverse, multidisciplinary research and education in the Schools of Medicine and Engineering. Professor Woo’s 50+ years of translational research in orthopaedics has led to improvements in healing and repair of tissues. Over 645 bioengineering students, orthopaedic residents, postdoctoral fellows plus many junior faculty members have studied and worked with him. The novel concepts of functional treatment and “controlled motion is good” have significantly impacted the management of ligament, tendon and sports related injuries – clinical paradigm shifts to improved patient outcome. Professor Woo has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering and Academia Sinica (Taiwan). In 1998, he received the Olympic Prize for Sports Medicine from the International Olympic Committee and the first Olympic Gold Medal at the Nagano Games in Japan.