AI and surgical decision making

Editor's Note

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with surgical decision making could transform care by augmenting the decision to perform surgery, informed consent process, identification and mitigation of modifiable risk factors, decisions on postoperative management, and shared decision for resource use, this review finds.

Surgical decision making involves hypothetical-deductive reasoning, individual judgment, and heuristics--factors that can lead to bias, error, and harm.

Predictive analytics and clinical decision-support systems can augment surgical decision making, but their utility is compromised by time-consuming manual data management and inaccuracies.

The challenges of traditional approaches can be overcome by AI models fed with livestreaming intraoperative and electronic health record data to augment surgical decision making through pre-, intra-, and postoperative phases of care, the researchers say.