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?

The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature--what happens in the OR stays in the OR--because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. Grantcharov jokes that when you ask "Who are the top three surgeons in the world?" a typical surgeon "always has a challenge identifying who the other two are." But after the initial humiliation over watching himself work, Grantcharov started to see the value in recording his operations. "There are so many small details that normally take years and years of practice to realize--that some surgeons never get to that point," he says. "Suddenly, I could see all these insights and opportunities overnight."