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77th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

24.05. - 28.05.2006, Mannheim

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Surgical Workflow Analysis - An Objective Description Method in ENT-Surgery

Workflowanalysen als objektives Beschreibungsmittel in der HNO-Chirurgie

Meeting Abstract

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  • corresponding author presenting/speaker Oliver Burgert - ICCAS, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
  • Gero Strauß - Universität Lipzig, Department of ENT-surgery, Leipzig, Germany
  • Thomas Neumuth - ICCAS, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
  • Andreas Dietz - Universität Lipzig, Department of ENT-surgery, Leipzig, Germany

German Society of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. 77th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. Mannheim, 24.-28.05.2006. Düsseldorf, Köln: German Medical Science; 2006. Doc06hno004

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.egms.de/en/meetings/hno2006/06hno004.shtml

Published: September 7, 2006

© 2006 Burgert et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.

Outline

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Purpose: Surgical interventions are more and more supported by technical, mechatronic or other devices. In the development of such devices, a proper analysis of the surgical procedure and the resulting characteristics of a surgical assistance system are often neglected. Surgical Workflow Analysis closes this gap and is also a valuable tool for the evaluation of newly developed devices or changes in surgical strategy.

Methods: Within ICCAS, we developed a software for intraoperative acquisition of surgical procedures using a tablet-PC. The software can easily be tailored to the needs of a specific intervention or surgical question by changing the underlying ontology. It is possible to record at a fine level of granularity (e.g. view directions, actions of each hand ...). The recorded workflows are stored in a XML-data structure which allows further automatic processing.

Figure 1 [Fig. 1]

Results: The data acquisition does not interfere with the intervention course. The recorded workflows have been used to answer different surgical questions like the usefulness of bi-handed manipulation or the usefulness of a mechatronic endoscope holding device. 39 mircrolaryngoscopies (MLS) and 46 functional endoscopic sinus surgeries (FESS) have been recorded so far. Furthermore, we used the methodology to track the usage of all intraoperative surgical devices during one week to estimate the requirements for a newly built OR.

Conclusions: Surgical Workflow Analysis is a valuable method for analysing surgical techniques. It can be used to answer a broad variety of questions. A recording at fine granularity allows answering even unexpected questions to the surgical workflow.