AI Enters the Operating Room: Increasing Access to Surgery
Published 27 March 2025
As artificial intelligence (AI) enters the operating room, it’s increasing patient access to life-saving care. Novel AI software is analysing surgery footage, offering doctors real-time feedback, enabling remote knowledge-sharing between medical professionals, and creating post-operation evaluations. Stylus highlights how AI can render surgical procedures standardised and globally accessible.
- Opening Up the Operating Room: London-based AI company Proximie connects operating rooms globally by capturing video and audio during surgery and analysing it with AI. Its platform enables real-time collaboration between surgeons (giving the option to consult expert surgeons elsewhere), and tracks metrics during operations (like how much time it took to administer anaesthesia, or what instruments were used).
“The operating room is incredibly opaque,” said Proximie founder Nadine Hachach-Haram at Wired Health 2025. She created the platform after noticing that the details of how a surgery is performed, or how surgeons react to emergencies, go unrecorded.
Similarly, American health tech company Medtronic's Touch Surgery AI films operations, analyses footage, and provides post-operative insights to optimise workflow (by comparing surgeries and advising how they can be made faster or safer). And it allows surgeons to assess their performance by comparing their surgery videos with others, standardising procedures and enhancing patient safety. - Increasing Surgery Access: In 2023, average non-emergency surgery wait times were 77 days in Spain, 62 days in the UK, and 28 days in the US (Statista, 2024). AI operating room software promises to reduce wait times by freeing staff from administrative tasks, such as by automatically sharing surgery updates with nursing staff outside the operating room.
- Accelerating Medical Education: AI integration in operation rooms can accelerate training. Trainee surgeons can access footage from Proximie and Medtronic's Touch Surgery AI or follow surgeries in real time, allowing them to observe more procedures than in the operating room alone. Experienced surgeons can also learn from each other by analysing other surgeons’ operations.
For more on AI and healthcare, see Three Trends in Next-Gen Lifestyles