About SAIIL

The Massachusetts General Hospital Surgical Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Laboratory (SAIIL) is a multidisciplinary group composed of surgeons, engineers and data scientists who are passionate about redesigning the delivery of surgical care. The team is made up of surgeons in Mass General’s Department of Surgery and scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Together, our team has developed tools to help unlock the intraoperative phase of care.

Our primary emphasis is on utilizing computer vision to investigate the intraoperative phase of care through real-time, automated surgical analysis. In other words, we use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze and interpret videos of operations as they are occurring. The goal is to teach the AI to understand what is happening in an operation, determine whether the risk for a postoperative complication is high, or even provide surgeons with additional data to improve operating room decisions.

While the field of surgical research has improved its ability to study pre- and postoperative events and risk using claims data and patient registries, the intraoperative phase of care remains difficult to study.

In a review of nationwide data, researchers estimated that major intraoperative adverse events (i.e. accidental damage to bowel or major blood vessels) can occur in 2% of all operations. Approximately 22 million general surgery operations are performed each year in the United States and 440,000 patients may experience an intraoperative adverse event a year. The cost of hospital admission is 41% higher in these patients, and the consequences of adverse events can impact their quality of life. An expected one-day stay could turn into a month-long hospitalization, additional procedures, prolonged rehabilitation, or a host of other life-altering consequences.