Artificial Intelligence and Surgical Decision-making

Importance: Surgeons make complex, high-stakes decisions under time constraints and uncertainty, with significant effect on patient outcomes. This review describes the weaknesses of traditional clinical decision-support systems and proposes that artificial intelligence should be used to augment surgical decision-making. Observations: Surgical decision-making is dominated by hypothetical-deductive reasoning, individual judgment, and heuristics. These factors can lead to bias, error, and preventable harm. Traditional predictive analytics and clinical decision-support systems are intended to augment surgical decision-making, but their clinical utility is compromised by time-consuming manual data management and…