Automated estimation of surgery duration for the optimization of operative rooms' planning

Abstract

At the University Hospital of Lille, the operative rooms' planning is based on estimated durations of surgery, so that a theoretical time is automatically affected depending on types of surgery independently of surgeons and techniques. As a result, this estimated duration of surgery is not updated, and does not take into account the evolution of surgical techniques or increasing surgeon's experience. In clinical practice, computing surgery duration for each surgeon and each type of surgery could be time consuming regarding the high number of interventions. In this paper, we assumed that Electronic Health Records can be used to automatically estimate theoretical durations of surgery in order to optimize operative rooms' scheduling. Finally, we validated our system in the particular context of total hip replacement duration estimation.