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Just Published! 😎 BIG THANKS to the 80+ authors who contributed to the 1st hard cover book geared for the surgical PA @NeilFlochMD @rbarbosa91 @farkomd @JBMatthews @LilianaBordei @wchrisfox @SWexner @ScottRSteeleMD @MN_GIMD @SeanLangenfeld @pferrada1 @pakotze @AASPASurgeryPA
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
🙌 today.wayne.edu/medicine/new… congratulations @SyedAAhmad5 Wayne State Surgery, patients and trainees are so lucky to get such an amazing and empathic leader!
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Navi Pillay, the respected South African judge who chaired the independent UN inquiry that concluded in 2025 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, has just won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
nature.com/articles/s44484-0… – at Kelsterbach, Deutschland
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
When you’re up all night doing a complex, lifesaving intervention that needed all of the skills obtained over many years, and you finally get home in the morning, sustained only by rapidly fading adrenaline, and your kid looks at you like, WTF why aren’t you making my pancakes.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Physicists may have found the origin of gravity. And that would finally explain why gravity is different from the other forces of nature.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Daniel Hashimoto, MD, MTSR, a national leader in research on data science and the use of AI in surgery, will join Duke Surgery this fall as an Associate Professor in the Division of Minimally Invasive Surgery.
Read more: bit.ly/4wCqmuX
@DukeMedSchool
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Less protein, more lifespan!
A comprehensive review of the merits of protein restriction for healthy aging
A flip from the proteinmaxxing craze
"cell.com/cell-press-blue/ful…
So glad to have you contribute @NeilFlochMD and for delivering a superb chapter that knocked it out of the park ! 💫📚 – at Calvià, Spain
It’s an honor to have written chapter 15: Metabolic Surgery in “Fundamentals of Surgery for Physician Assistants”. Thank you Sam Atallah MD for inviting me to write this chapter which discusses the comprehensive treatment of obesity #bariatricsurgery #GLP
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
It’s an honor to have written chapter 15: Metabolic Surgery in “Fundamentals of Surgery for Physician Assistants”. Thank you Sam Atallah MD for inviting me to write this chapter which discusses the comprehensive treatment of obesity #bariatricsurgery #GLP
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Undisciplined work is just a slow drain on your time and energy.
True progress only comes from disciplined, focused effort.
Consistency and discipline are the non-negotiable keys to real success.
Without them, everything you do becomes pure waste.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Congratulations to ACS Fellows Drs. Garth R. Jacobsen and Ryan Broderick on demonstrating the first successful use of teleoperated humanoid robots to perform minimally invasive surgery in live preclinical models. 🤖
Learn more: brnw.ch/21x4roC
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Robotic-assisted #cholecystectomy for complex cases reduced postoperative interventions and complications, with no increase in overall health care cost compared to #laparoscopy.
ja.ma/4yke8Zv
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
I am saddened beyond words by the tragic sudden death of my dear friend of almost 40 years, Dr. Guillermo “Billy” Rosato. His loss leaves a huge irreplaceable void in our hearts and souls. Our prayers and condolences go to his family: Monica, Florencia, Clarita, Ivan, Patsy, Alex
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Surgery is as physically demanding as it is intellectually challenging. The cumulative effects of long hours, awkward ergonomics, and occupational exposures make investing in your own health and well-being essential for career longevity and optimal patient care.
Being a surgeon is a privilege—but it comes with hidden costs. Beyond burnout, surgeons face daily occupational hazards that accumulate over a career. Our review highlights the unseen alligators of the OR and why surgeon safety matters. #Safety
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Thank u for the kind words @MN_GIMD ☺️ I am grateful to you and @AMohammedMD for putting together a superb chapter & for helping shape this book (along side the 100+ experts from across the globe) to create a product geared specifically for our valued APPs ❤️ @SpringerSurgery 📚
Two years in the making, this chapter reflects something we have cared about from the very beginning of our fellowship: supporting education across the division, including for our APP colleagues.
From welcoming APPs into our didactics to having our fellows speak at dedicated APP learning sessions, our fellows have consistently demonstrated that education is a responsibility shared by the entire healthcare team. Seeing that commitment embraced by our fellows has been one of the most gratifying parts of building this program.
And how fitting that this chapter comes full circle just as @AMohammedMD graduates from advanced fellowship & joins us as an attending and colleague.
Watching that evolution - from fellow, to co-author, to colleague - makes this project even more special.
A sincere thank you to the editors @SamAtallahMD for the opportunity to contribute a chapter on “Endoscopic Therapies for Surgical Conditions”.
It is both an honor and a privilege to be included in this outstanding educational resource.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
Two years in the making, this chapter reflects something we have cared about from the very beginning of our fellowship: supporting education across the division, including for our APP colleagues.
From welcoming APPs into our didactics to having our fellows speak at dedicated APP learning sessions, our fellows have consistently demonstrated that education is a responsibility shared by the entire healthcare team. Seeing that commitment embraced by our fellows has been one of the most gratifying parts of building this program.
And how fitting that this chapter comes full circle just as @AMohammedMD graduates from advanced fellowship & joins us as an attending and colleague.
Watching that evolution - from fellow, to co-author, to colleague - makes this project even more special.
A sincere thank you to the editors @SamAtallahMD for the opportunity to contribute a chapter on “Endoscopic Therapies for Surgical Conditions”.
It is both an honor and a privilege to be included in this outstanding educational resource.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
"GPT-5.5 Pro Outperforms 99.9% of Doctors and Predicts AI Superiority in Medicine by Next Year"
An optimistic AI viewpoint since there are no studies in real world medicine; all we have now are simulations, case vignettes, patient actors, etc. Beyond that, performance metrics need work as we've recently open-source published.
Here's what the editors @NatureMedicine wrote: This study cuts through the optimism surrounding medical AI by showing how easily benchmark success can be
mistaken for real readiness. In medical AI, impressive scores are clearly not the same as trustworthy capability.” [link below]
Our results were independently confirmed by @yishan in current frontier models, such as GPT-5.5 Pro, text below
nature.com/articles/s41591-0…
xitter.cf/yishan/status/20707427…"
A big problem with research studies on AI models is that given how long the peer review process is, the results are always out-of-date by the time the paper is published.
This time, we have something better!
The typical reaction to research results like this roughly goes "You're just testing on old models. Today's models are way better and surely can do it now!"
But the best solution is for these papers to also open-source all of their testing framework so that upon publication, others can reproduce their results, as well as run it on the newest models of the day - and into the future. After all, "this is the worst they'll ever be" so what really matters is determining when they DO pass the threshold.
As it turns out, the authors of this paper DID open-source their evaluation framework!
Here:
github.com/aiden-ygu/health-…
So I figured... let's re-run the tests on the latest models!
Summary of our results are here:
github.com/ywong137/health-a…
One drawback is that, unfortunately, the authors didn't (or weren't legally able to) open-source ALL the testing data, since apparently some of it is copyrighted by JAMA/NEJM etc. That's a separate problem with the medical research publishing industry for another time.
However, we were able to reproduce the test on the public datasets they did include!
First, we re-ran the same tests (as closely as we could) on the old models the paper claimed to use, in order to establish a baseline and determine how much "drift" there would be. (Answer: not too much)
Then we ran those tests on the newest frontier models we could find.
The results are: the most capable models today (GPT-5.5 Pro) did outperform the best models from before (79/100 vs 69/100), but did not improve enough to be considered sufficient for reliable medical use.
In fact, the paper's criterion for "fit for reliable medical use" is more stringent, requiring the models to be robust under perturbation and bad data, knowing when to say there's not enough information, give clinically valid reasoning rather than hallucinations, etc. Those sound pretty reasonable to me.
I wasn't able to reproduce that kind of qualitative evaluation, but even on the basic pass/fail test using public datasets of interpreting radiology images, the newest models are better, but not yet quite good enough.
Nevertheless, I would like to praise the paper's authors for at least open-sourcing what they could, enabling me to (fairly quickly) attempt to reproduce their results. This is definitely a step in the right direction!
While my reproduction wasn't able to be comprehensive, it certainly gave me useful directional info and - perhaps more importantly - allowed me (a random dude on the internet) to directly reproduce the results in their paper and validate them.
I would like to encourage ALL authors of research papers on AI models to do similar open-sourcing of their experimental frameworks!
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
“No options left” is often just exhaustion talking. When we’re tired, disappointed, or stuck, it’s easy to give up. But the next possibility appears only after we take a breath, ask for help, change the angle, or try the thing that feels too simple to matter.
Sam Atallah, MD retweeted
"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses."
- Johannes Kepler
































