AI for Quality Assurance in the Operating Room

Surgical outcomes depend not only on patient factors and postoperative care but are also strongly influenced by the quality of the operation itself.

Yet, for much of mod-ern surgery, intraoperative quality has been assessed indirectly through outcomes and operative reports.

The increase in minimally invasive procedures inherently guided by endoscopic video, together with advances in artificial intelligence, creates an unprecedented opportunity to systematically observe, measure, and improve surgi-cal care.

This chapter introduces AI-enabled Surgical Quality Assurance as a frame-work for using surgical data to support continuous assessment and improvement in the operating room.

We first review existing approaches to surgical safety, from sys-tem-level interventions to procedure-specific standards.

We then describe how AI can transform intraoperative video into clinically meaningful information, including recog-nition of anatomy, instruments, workflow, surgical actions, quality criteria, adverse events, and critical moments.

Finally, we outline the major challenges that must be addressed before these systems can deliver routine clinical value, including representa-tive data collection, robust validation, workflow integration, regulation, liability, pri-vacy, and equitable access.

Rather than replacing surgical judgment, AI for quality assurance should be understood as a set of tools for augmenting the surgical team, scaling expert review, and helping surgery evolve toward a learning system in which intraoperative care is continuously observed, assessed, and improved.