Network and social media: the digital surgeon

Digital surgery is the use of technology in order to share information, educate, and improve clinical outcomes. The outbreak of COVID-19 forced healthcare professionals to find new ways of taking care of patients, sharing therapeutical decisions, and maintaining research progress. Social media and networks played a pivotal role in the diffusion of information and research projects but also in the psychological support both for patients and healthcare professionals. Residents found space for education through dedicated pages on social media platforms which have shown an enormous potentiality, able to completely modify current info sharing mechanisms, and teaching-learning techniques. Artificial intelligence and machine learning may represent new technologies able to guide younger trainees and to collect huge amount of data to analyse, study, and reproduce surgical procedures. Surgical training benefited from artificial intelligence in terms of simulators, but also with regard to telemedicine and tutoring that derives from these networks. In the era of digital surgery, the physicians cannot be dedicated only to the operating theatre, but they have to find their full dimension into the figure of surgeon-scientists. Social media do represent one of the fastest and most efficacious tool to share a single surgeon’s work with the whole scientific community and to help physicians to keep updated every day in real time.