JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being applied across the perioperative continuum. AI should be viewed as a technology that can reduce cognitive burden, collate fragmented data into clinically meaningful information, support decision making, and extend precision education to clinicians and patients. This editorial accompanies the JMIR Perioperative Medicine webinar held in May 2026 and examines where AI can assist perioperative clinicians and surgical patients, the evidence available today and what is still needed, and how clinicians can prepare to practice alongside these tools. We consider opportunities in preoperative risk assessment and optimization, intraoperative intelligent decision support, emerging technologies such as surgical digital twins, and postoperative recovery, monitoring, and prediction of clinical deterioration. Most AI applications remain early and require large-scale, prospective validation across diverse populations and resource settings. Realizing this potential will also require confronting substantial challenges, including limited and fragmented training data, the specialized models needed to interpret the large volumes of data captured in operative videos and during physiological monitoring, biases embedded in data and algorithms or inherent in human-AI interactions, and determining where human oversight is essential and where it is not feasible. Used responsibly, with human judgment remaining paramount, AI offers an unprecedented opportunity to advance perioperative care.