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Surgical site infections (SSIs) affect 2–20% of surgical procedures and are a major source of postoperative morbidity, prolonged hospitalization, readmission, mortality, and healthcare costs, making prevention a key priority. Existing prediction tools such as the NNIS index and SENIC score depend on a limited set of clinical variables including wound class, ASA status, and operative duration, while failing to capture complex interactions among patients, surgeons, and comorbidities. To address this limitation, we propose a graph attention network (GAT) framework that represents each surgical case as a heterogeneous graph composed of patient, surgeon, and comorbidity nodes, with intraoperative variables included as features and attention mechanisms used to learn the most influential relationships. This approach models relational dependencies such as the interaction between surgeon experience, patient conditions, and comorbidity combinations, enabling more accurate and context-aware SSI risk prediction to support personalized preventive interventions.

Postoperative complications including SSI (2–20%), VTE (1–5%), and respiratory failure (1–8%) significantly increase morbidity, mortality, length of stay, and readmissions. This systematic review assessed machine learning models predicting these outcomes, their performance, external validation, and clinical deployment. A PRISMA-based search (2017–2024) identified 32 eligible studies. Models such as random forest and XGBoost showed AUROC ranges of 0.70–0.85 for SSI, 0.75–0.90 for VTE (outperforming Caprini scores), and 0.75–0.88 for respiratory failure. However, fewer than 20% of studies included external validation and less than 5% reported clinical deployment. Overall, while machine learning models show strong retrospective performance, limited validation and minimal real-world implementation remain major barriers to clinical translation.

Surgical site infections (SSIs) remain a significant source of postoperative morbidity despite established guidelines for perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis. Current protocols emphasize fixed preoperative timing and interval-based intraoperative redosing, yet fail to account for patient heterogeneity, pharmacokinetic variability, and uncertainty in procedure duration. This study proposes a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework for personalized optimization of antibiotic prophylaxis across the perioperative timeline. The framework decomposes decision-making into two coordinated levels: a high-level policy that determines optimal preoperative antibiotic timing based on predicted procedure duration and patient-specific infection risk, and a low-level policy that adaptively manages intraoperative redosing using real-time updates on elapsed time, remaining duration, and cumulative drug exposure. Procedure duration is estimated using machine learning models that provide both point predictions and uncertainty intervals, enabling risk-sensitive decision-making. The problem is formalized as a Markov decision process with a reward structure balancing SSI prevention against antibiotic stewardship, incorporating penalties for unnecessary dosing and suboptimal timing. Off-policy evaluation using historical surgical data is proposed to assess performance relative to guideline-based and clinician-driven strategies. By integrating predictive modeling with multi-timescale decision optimization, the framework aims to reduce SSI incidence while minimizing antibiotic overuse. This approach highlights the potential of reinforcement learning to advance precision perioperative care and improve clinical outcomes through adaptive, data-driven prophylaxis strategies.