Surgical data science: the new knowledge domain

Abstract

Healthcare in general, and surgery/interventional care in particular, is evolving through rapid advances in technology and increasing complexity of care with the goal of maximizing quality and value of care. While innovations in diagnostic and therapeutic technologies have driven past improvements in quality of surgical care, future transformation in care will be enabled by data. Conventional methodologies, such as registry studies, are limited in their scope for discovery and research, extent and complexity of data, breadth of analytic techniques, and translation or integration of research findings into patient care. We foresee the emergence of Surgical/Interventional Data Science (SDS) as a key element to addressing these limitations and creating a sustainable path toward evidence-based improvement of interventional healthcare pathways. SDS will create tools to measure, model and quantify the pathways or processes within the context of patient health states or outcomes, and use information gained to inform healthcare decisions, guidelines, best practices, policy, and training, thereby improving the safety and quality of healthcare and its value. Data is pervasive throughout the surgical care pathway; thus, SDS can impact various aspects of care including prevention, diagnosis, intervention, or post-operative recovery. Existing literature already provides preliminary results suggesting how a data science approach to surgical decision-making could more accurately predict severe complications using complex data from pre-, intra-, and post-operative contexts, how it could support intra-operative decision-making using both existing knowledge and continuous data streams throughout the surgical care pathway, and how it could enable effective collaboration between human care providers and intelligent technologies. In addition, SDS is poised to play a central role in surgical education, for example, through objective assessments, automated virtual coaching, and robot-assisted active learning of surgical skill. However, the potential for transforming surgical care and training through SDS may only be realized through a cultural shift that not only institutionalizes technology to seamlessly capture data but also assimilates individuals with expertise in data science into clinical research teams. Furthermore, collaboration with industry partners from the inception of the discovery process promotes optimal design of data products as well as their efficient translation and commercialization. As surgery continues to evolve through advances in technology that enhance delivery of care, SDS represents a new knowledge domain to engineer surgical care of the future.

CAI4CAI: The Rise of Contextual Artificial Intelligence in Computer-Assisted Interventions

“…An essential component of the control tower is the datadriven modeling and understanding of the clinical activities, an undertaking that taps into the emerging research field of Surgical Data Science [3], [4]. Machine learning has been key to generate models of procedural interventions from data [139], [140] and ontologies have also been developed to standardize the resulting models [141].…”

Human-AI Collaboration in Healthcare: A Review and Research Agenda

“…Focusing only on one specialization, psychotherapy, Miner and colleagues [16] outlined four approaches and dimensions of care that conversational AI will affect when integrated into mental health service delivery. Focusing on surgery and surgical data science (SDS), Vedula and Hager [26] suggested that SDS could transform passive surgical technologies into an interactive platform that can collaborate with and actively assist physicians. Motivated by the "black box" problem in AI techniques, Lai and colleagues [13] reviewed research on CDSS with respect to the role of explanations.…”

Surgery 4.0: the natural culmination of the industrial revolution?

“…In this issue, the theoretical background of Surgery 4.0 is outlined by Vedula and Hager [2] in their paper “Surgical data science: the new knowledge domain”. They posited compellingly that future transformation in surgical care will be driven by data/information.…”