The increase in elderly patients undergoing surgery, the change in the invasiveness of some surgical interventions, limitations in the methodology and generalizability of previous research, and the VISION Pilot Study results highlight uncertainty about the current incidence of major vascular events and the optimal clinical risk estimation model to predict these events in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. There is promising but inconclusive preliminary evidence that troponin measurements after surgery may allow physicians to avoid missing perioperative myocardial infarctions and may predict mortality and major vascular events in the first year following surgery. These considerations provide the impetus for the large, adequately powered, multicentre, international, prospective cohort study.