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Surgical skills: Can learning curves be computed from recordings of surgical activities?

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Surgery is one of the riskiest and most important medical acts that are performed today. The need to improve patient outcomes and surgeon training, and to reduce the costs of surgery, has motivated the equipment of operating rooms with sensors that record surgical interventions. The richness and complexity of the data that are collected call for new methods to support computer-assisted surgery. The aim of this paper is to support the monitoring of junior surgeons learning their surgical skill sets.

Methods

Our method is fully automatic and takes as input a series of surgical interventions each represented by a low-level recording of all activities performed by the surgeon during the intervention (e.g., cut the skin with a scalpel). Our method produces a curve describing the process of standardization of the behavior of junior surgeons. Given the fact that junior surgeons receive constant feedback from senior surgeons during surgery, these curves can be directly interpreted as learning curves.

Results

Our method is assessed using the behavior of a junior surgeon in anterior cervical discectomy and fusion surgery over his first three years after residency. They revealed the ability of the method to accurately represent the surgical skill evolution. We also showed that the learning curves can be computed by phases allowing a finer evaluation of the skill progression.

Conclusion

Preliminary results suggest that our approach constitutes a useful addition to surgical training monitoring.

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Notes

  1. http://germain-forestier.info/src/ipcai2018/.

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Acknowledgements

Dr François Petitjean is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (Project Number DE170100037) funded by the Australian Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIMAS, University of Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, France

    Germain Forestier

  2. Department of Neurosurgery, Univ. Hospital, Univ Rennes, Inserm, LTSI (Laboratoire Traitement du Signal et de l’Image) - UMR_S 1099, 35000, Rennes, France

    Laurent Riffaud & Pierre-Louis Henaux

  3. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Germain Forestier & François Petitjean

  4. Univ Rennes, Inserm, LTSI (Laboratoire Traitement du Signal et de l’Image) - UMR_S 1099, 35000, Rennes, France

    Pierre Jannin

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  1. Germain Forestier
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  3. François Petitjean
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  4. Pierre-Louis Henaux
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Correspondence to Germain Forestier.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Forestier, G., Riffaud, L., Petitjean, F. et al. Surgical skills: Can learning curves be computed from recordings of surgical activities?. Int J CARS 13, 629–636 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1713-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1713-y

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