Surgical data science, an emerging field of medicine

Abstract

Abstract-Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS) significantly changed the course of interventional medicine. The development of medical imaging opened up the possibility for accurate, patient specific planning, and advanced imaging techniques provided the ground for the development of real-time navigation systems. The advancement of minimally invasive surgical techniques and tools required increasing manuality from the surgeon, which facilitated the development of tele-robotic manipulation. These systems provide a vast amount of objective inta-operative data, thus many believe that the next step could be big data analysis for creating and evaluating surgical process models. This emerging field of medicine, called Surgical Data Science, has the potential to improve intervetional medicine with objective statistical analysis, and therefore to provide better patient outcomes and a reduction in healthcare costs.

OntoFlow, a software tool for surgical workflow recording

“…Real-time integration with external data sources (surgical robot, patient monitor etc.) in a longer term could enable the system to automatically recognize workflow steps, and eventually to create decision support systems, and context aware automation [21].…”

Probabilistic Method to Improve the Accuracy of Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems

“…Within all these domains, data collection at large scale became possible with the introduction of CIS systems, also as an enabler of Machine Learning methods [10]. This opened the case for a completely new field, dubbed Surgical Data Science [11], which really enables the assessment and benchmarking of CIS systems based on surgical process models [12].…”