At a neurosurgery practice in Northeast Florida, an artificial intelligence kiosk named XenVision is transforming how patients see their own bodies, and how they see their doctor.
The patients who arrive at Dr. Ali Chahlavi’s office usually come with a thick folder of scans and a long history of pain. Some have been living with it for years. Many have been told, in one way or another, that their imaging does not look as bad as they say they feel.
“Many of the people who come to me have lived with pain for years,” said Dr. Chahlavi, a neurosurgeon at Ascension St. Vincent’s in Jacksonville. “They’ve been told their scans look ‘not that bad,’ and they start to wonder if it’s all in their head.”
Now, before those patients sit down with him, they spend less than two minutes in front of a kiosk that watches them move.
The system, called XenVision, and developed by Xenco Medical, uses cameras and artificial intelligence to build a moving digital model of a patient’s skeleton. It then measures posture, joint motion, range of motion, and the balance between the left and right sides of the body. Dr. Chahlavi’s clinic is the 11th in the United States to install a unit since the platform launched in July. So far, XenVision units have analyzed 6,163 patients nationwide.
For Dr. Chahlavi, the numbers matter less than what happens when patients see them.
“When they see their own movement on the screen and the imbalance is right there, measured and real, I’ve watched people tear up,” he said. “For the first time, someone is showing them that what they feel is true.”
From the Laboratory to the Exam Room
For decades, researchers have studied human movement in gait laboratories, specialized rooms where patients wear reflective markers while banks of cameras track them. The method was precise, but it was tedious, expensive and far removed from the ordinary doctor’s visit. The markerless XenVision technology offered to Dr. Chahlavi’s patients is a paradigm shift.
Xenco Medical unveiled XenVision in July at SIGGRAPH, the annual motion capture and computer graphics conference. There, the company described the system as a way to bring quantitative movement analysis out of the laboratory and into everyday clinics, with no markers or wearable sensors required. That training, it says, allows the system to detect subtle changes in posture and movement that often appear before symptoms become serious.
The technology works in stages. High-resolution cameras first capture the patient’s movement. AI models then estimate the position of the body’s joints over time, assembling what engineers call a kinematic chain, a digital skeleton that moves as the patient moves. A second layer of analysis turns that skeleton into clinical measurements, including postural alignment, symmetry, movement efficiency, and the compensating strategies people unconsciously adopt to avoid pain.
Xenco Medical has been careful to present XenVision as a complement to the traditional examination rather than a replacement for it. Dr. Chahlavi agreed.
“So much of spine care comes down to how a patient moves, and for most of my career we’ve judged that by eye,” he said. “XenVision gives us objective numbers in the time it takes to walk a patient to the exam room. It doesn’t replace the exam. It strongly sharpens it.”
‘Motion Is Independence’
Dr. Chahlavi has practiced in Jacksonville for more than 20 years. He serves as Director of Neuroscience and Chief of Surgery at Ascension St. Vincent’s, and trained in neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic. His practice focuses on minimally invasive and robotic-assisted spine surgery, along with techniques designed to preserve motion rather than fuse the spine in place.
That focus shapes how he talks about his patients.
“My patients don’t talk to me about vertebrae,” he said. “They talk about being able to pick up a grandchild, walk the beach, or get through a day of work without counting the hours. Motion is independence. When we measure how someone moves, we’re really measuring how much of their life they still have in their own hands, and how much we can give back.”
Spine conditions are notoriously hard to explain. An M.R.I. captures anatomy in a single frozen moment. It cannot show how a patient leans away from a pinched nerve, or how one hip quietly takes on more work than the other. Dr. Chahlavi said the moving images help close that gap.
“The conversation changes the moment a patient sees their own movement on the screen,” he said. “Instead of me describing what I’m seeing, we’re looking at it together. Patients lean in, they ask better questions, and they become real partners in their care.”
He said that shift matters most at the start, when patients are often frightened.
“Nobody walks into a neurosurgeon’s office relaxed,” he said. “People are frightened, and fear makes it hard to hear anything. Showing a patient their own body, in their own movement, replaces some of that fear with understanding. And understanding is where trust begins.”
Making Recovery Visible
Because each AI-powered exam takes under two minutes, the assessment can be repeated at nearly every visit: before treatment, after surgery, and through months of rehabilitation.
For patients, Dr. Chahlavi said, that repetition can be the difference between perseverance and discouragement.
“Recovery is slow and often invisible, and that’s when people lose heart,” he said. “Being able to show a patient that they’re turning further, standing straighter and moving more evenly than they did a month ago gives them something to hold on to. Sometimes that proof is as healing as anything I do in the operating room.”
A Broader Shift
XenVision arrives as health care moves slowly away from treating problems episodically and toward tracking patients continuously, with an emphasis on prevention and measurable outcomes. Camera-based systems like it face real-world variables such as lighting, clothing and how a patient is positioned in front of the camera. As with any new clinical tool, independent studies will help establish how its measurements compare with those from traditional gait laboratories.
Still, adoption has moved quickly for a platform introduced only two months ago, and Dr. Chahlavi said he sees it as the beginning of something larger.
“We’re at the beginning of a real shift in how we measure function in spine care,” he said. “Tools like XenVision let us catch subtle changes earlier and follow patients more closely, and I’m very proud that patients here in Northeast Florida are among the first in the country to benefit.”
In the end, he said, the innovative technology serves an old purpose: listening to patients.
“Every spine I treat belongs to a person with a story,” Dr. Chahlavi said. “This technology helps me see the story in how they move.”