Towards the Future of Surgery

Dr.Jacopo  Martellucci specialized in digestive surgery with honors at  the University of Siena, where he also obtained his PhD in Oncology and Genetics (surgical oncology section).  He currently works in the Emergency Surgery Unit at Careggi University Hospital, Florence. He is mainly involved in colo-rectal surgery, minimally invasive surgery, oncological and functional surgery of the digestive tract, emergency surgery, surgical training, robotic surgery, new technologies. He has more than 200 publications in national and international indexed journals, has been editor of two books published by Springer and numerous participations in conferences and courses as a speaker, tutor, lecturer or member of scientific board. He is also a member of several national and international societies. He serves on the editorial board of Techniques in Coloproctology journal.

After graduating magna cum laude from Udine University, Francesca Dal Mas joined Bologna lawschool, where she got her law degree in 2007. She started her career as an independent consultant and teacher in 2005. Lifelong learning is her motto: in 2015 she decided to start a new challenge, and she joined Udine & Trieste Universities' joint Ph.D. program in Managerial and Actuarial Sciences. During her Ph.D. time, she has been to several Universities as a guest speaker (Sharif University of Technology, Teheran, Iran; Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan) or visiting colleagues to develop joint research projects (La Sapienza University, Rome, Italy; University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy; Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong; Graduate School of Management, St Petersburg University, Russia; University of Salento, Lecce, Italy). Her research interests include healthcare management, knowledge management, intellectual capital, and business models. She has several research collaborations in many countries, and shecooperates with scholars from premier institutions and universities like Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. In September 2019, she joined the Lincoln International Business School as a Senior Lecturer in Strategy & Enterprise. She moved back to Italy in March 2022. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Accounting, Strategy, and Healthcare Management at the Venice School of Management of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

The book provides an overview of the characteristics and skills - both technical and soft - needed to become the surgical leaders of tomorrow.  During the COVID pandemic, the methodological weakness in accessing and disseminating information in has become evident: this has fostered the digital development and has favoured the creation of networks and communities of individuals (not only physicians or surgeons) pointing the way to global knowledge sharing. The development of the technological offer applied to surgery has been very rapid, with the integration of minimally invasive and robotic surgery with artificial intelligence and computerization of decision-making processes, up to the extreme limit of space surgery. However, in the future of this discipline surgeons will no longer need to consider only improved access to knowledge and evolution of technology, as a great challenge will be represented by the parallel development of non-technical skills (leadership, communication, team-working) and by the careful application of healthcare management principles to clinical practice. Finally, in the near future (but already in the present), it will be impossible to ignore the economic impact of high-tech care and equity in access to care.  

The book describes a journey, which starts from the history of surgical education to cross the most relevant perspectives of present and future, exploring  new learning models, the thousand applications of artificial intelligence, and surgical technology to the space and back.