Correlation between surgical manipulations and the variation of surgeon's heart rate in brain surgery: technical note

For improvement of surgical performance and safety, we record surgeries by video cameras. However, analysis of the video records is time consuming. To help this task, we are developing methods to automatically mark up significant time points in the surgery. As a possible mean for the marking, we focused on the surgeon's heart rate. During a craniotomy of an intracranial glioma, we recorded the surgeon's electrocardiogram using a telemeter and measured the R-to-R interval (RRI). We detected the stable state of heart rate as a peak-to-peak RRI of less than 5% of the mean of RRI data from 15 consecutive heartbeats. We also quantified the frequency of brain touches by the surgeon under the surgical microscope. We examined the association between the stability of surgeon's heart rate and the brain touches using a chi-square test. As the result, the stable state of surgeon's heart rate was associated with the brain touches (p < 0.05, odds ratio 5.1). We edited a one-minute digest video of the surgery based on only the heart rate data, and it was sufficient to understand how the surgery was preceded.