<p>Anaesthesiology is evolving from a clinical-based discipline focused primarily on maintaining intraoperative safety into an evidence-based perioperative medicine that emphasizes comprehensive patient care throughout before, during and after surgery journey. This shift has given rise to several important interdisciplinary research directions, which warrant systematic summarisation to better define future perspectives. In this review, we discuss four key intersecting domains: anaesthesia and neuroscience, perioperative organ protection, anaesthesia and cancer, and anaesthesia therapy. Furthermore, based on emerging establishment of perioperative medicine databases that integrate diverse-source data and leverage artificial intelligence for large-scale data analysis, we propose four new perspectives of anaesthesiology including personalized and perioperative management strategy, anaesthetic and organ-protective drugs, anaesthesia techniques and intelligent devices.</p> Graphical Abstract <p></p>