What using artificial intelligence to help monitor surgery can teach us

Teodor Grantcharov, a professor of surgery at Stanford, thinks he has found a tool to make surgery safer and minimize human error: AI-powered "black boxes" in operating theaters that work in a similar way to an airplane's black box. These devices, built by Grantcharov's company Surgical Safety Technologies, record everything in the operating room via panoramic cameras, microphones in the ceiling, and anesthesia monitors before using artificial intelligence to help surgeons make sense of the data. They capture the entire operating room as a whole, from the number of times the door is opened to how many non-case-related conversations occur during an operation. These black boxes are in use in almost 40 institutions in the US, Canada, and Western Europe, from Mount Sinai to Duke to the Mayo Clinic. But are hospitals on the cusp of a new era of safety--or creating an environment of confusion and paranoia?