Neurosurgery 4.0: A Scoping Review of Current Trends and Challenges in Specialized Smart Hospitals

The worldwide increase in neurosurgical conditions, due to global population growth and increased life expectancy, challenges healthcare systems, necessitating more precise diagnostics and personalized treatment strategies despite workforce shortages. While rapid technological progress, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), holds significant promise for enhancing diagnostics, therapeutic strategies, and administrative efficiency in healthcare, there is a marked absence of comprehensive, field-specific analyses addressing these developments within specialized Smart Hospital environments such as neurosurgery centers. To date, the literature lacks a scoping review that synthesizes current trends, challenges, and opportunities across multiple dimensions, including technological, administrative, financial, and clinical aspects. This study presents the first scoping literature review on current AI implementation in healthcare systems, critically evaluating both its advantages and limitations, and aims to fill that gap by providing a holistic, multidisciplinary overview of the Smart Hospital concept in the context of neurosurgical care, offering a unique contribution to the existing body of knowledge. Additionally, based on a thorough analysis of examples of the most prominent existing Smart Hospital concepts, the study concludes with conceptual considerations and future research directions derived from the literature for the development of a novel, fully AI-driven neurosurgical Smart Hospital concept.