Clinical Informatics for Surgeons, Ep. 3: AI in the OR and Beyond; Machines That See, Read, and Act

Picture three machines in your next operation. One watches the laparoscopic feed and flags the zone that is not safe to divide. One reads the chart and has the op note and a plain-language patient summary done before you close. One works quietly in the background and has the ICU bed request queued before anyone asks. Notice that none of them hands you a percentage. In the series finale, Drs. Mason Pearce, Tyler Loftus, and Dan Hashimoto trace surgical AI from the NSQIP risk calculator to computer vision, large language models, and agentic systems: which of these is already in operating rooms, which is arriving fast, which is still mostly promise, and how a surgeon without a machine learning degree stays in control of all three.
Hosts: Mason Pearce, MD, General Surgery Resident and Clinical Informatics Fellow, University of South Florida; Behind the Knife Education Fellow Tyler J. Loftus, MD, PhD, Acute Care Surgeon and Associate Professor of Surgery; Program Director, General Surgery Residency, University of Florida; board certified in Clinical Informatics; Past Chair, ACS Health IT Committee Daniel A. Hashimoto, MD, MSTR, Associate Professor of Surgery and Director of Surgical Informatics, Duke University Health System; editor of Artificial Intelligence in Surgery Please visit behindtheknife.org for Learning Objectives and References for this episode.