Objective Assessment of Surgical Skills

Abstract

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has definitively changed the procedures performed in operating rooms. In many cases, MIS has become the recommended standard technique, replacing the traditional open surgery. Effective training and objective assessment of surgeons in these techniques become a major concern in hospitals in recent years, encouraged primarily by patients and a society that demands safer surgical procedures, which is associated with better surgeons training. In the framework of surgery, the difficulty of defining objective metrics for performance evaluation lies in the strict dependency between tasks and the difficulty of defining the meaning of optimal performance, related to the characterization of gestures made by the experts. An objective method to compare 3D gestures between an expert and novice surgeons through multidimensional data analysis is proposed in this paper. A survey of different algorithms for surgical gestures analysis in time domain is carried out. These ones include the Multi-dimensional Dynamic Time Warping (MD-DTW) and Multi-Dimensional Derivative Dynamic Time Warping (MD-DDTW). Simulation and experimental results are given with this different techniques.