Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Safe Intraoperative Decision Support

Lauren Gordon, MD, MSc; Teodor Grantcharov, MD, PhD; Frank Rudzicz, PhD

JAMA Surg. Published online September 11, 2019.

doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2019.2821

Intraoperative adverse events are a common and important cause of surgical morbidity.1,2 Strategies to reduce adverse events and mitigate their consequences have traditionally focused on surgical education, structured communication, and adverse event management. However, until now, little could be done to anticipate these events in the operating room. Advances in both data capture in the operating room and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to process these data open the way for real-time clinical decision support tools that can help surgical teams anticipate, understand, and prevent intraoperative events.