Deciphering the Language of Surgery

Data collected from robotic medical tools are being used to create mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery.

Scientists from the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University (JHU, Baltimore, MD, USA) have developed a way to use data from the da Vinci robotic surgical system, recording the movements of the robot and making them available for computer analysis. The system allows a surgeon seated at a computer workstation to guide robotic tools to perform minimally invasive procedures involving the heart, the prostate, and other organs. The robot's surgical movements can be digitally recorded and processed, and analyzed to mathematically model surgical tasks such as suturing, dissecting, and joining tissue.

According to the research team, complicated surgical tasks unfold in a series of steps that resemble the way that words, sentences, and paragraphs are used to convey language. Just as a speech recognition program might call attention to poor pronunciation or improper syntax, the system being developed would identify surgical movements that are imprecise or too time-consuming, leading to operating room (OR) problems. The team's long-term goal is to develop an objective way of evaluating a surgeon's work and to help doctors improve their OR skills. The study appears in the September 2006 edition of Computer Aided Surgery.

"Surgery is a skilled activity, and it has a structure that can be taught and acquired,” said lead investigator Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science at JHU. "We can think of that structure as ‘the language of surgery.' To develop mathematical models for this language, we're borrowing techniques from speech recognition technology and applying them to motion recognition and skills assessment.”

The da Vinci Surgical System was developed by Intuitive Surgical (Sunnyvale, CA, USA).



Related Links:
Johns Hopkins University
Intuitive Surgical