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How to Bring Surgery to the Next Level: Interpretable Skills Assessment in Robotic-Assisted Surgery
Kristen C Brown1, Kiran D Bhattacharyya1, Sue Kulason1
1Advanced Product Development, Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Norcross, Georgia, USA.
Visceral Medicine
|January 15, 2021
Summary
Objective performance indicators (OPIs) from robotic surgery data can now provide interpretable feedback for surgical trainees. This new method enhances understanding of skill improvement areas in robotic-assisted surgery (RAS).
Area of Science:
- Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) and surgical skill assessment.
- Development of objective performance indicators (OPIs) for surgical training.
Background:
- Traditional surgical skill assessment is subjective and resource-intensive.
- Robotic-assisted surgery generates objective data (e.g., instrument movements, button presses) that can be used for skill evaluation.
- Existing objective performance indicators (OPIs) lack interpretability for targeted feedback.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop interpretable objective performance indicators (OPIs) for key technical skills in robotic-assisted surgery.
- To create a data-driven framework for providing targeted feedback to surgical trainees.
Main Methods:
- Kinematic and event data from da Vinci surgical systems were analyzed to calculate OPIs.
- OPIs were mapped to technical skill categories and refined using a data-driven approach to identify skill-specific indicators.
- Logistic regression classifiers were built to predict expertise probability, with feedback derived from model coefficients.
Main Results:
- A small subset of OPIs (2-10) achieved high accuracy (80-95%) in estimating technical skills in clinical-like tasks.
- Skill models demonstrated accuracy comparable to overall task expertise prediction models (80-98%).
- The developed models provide interpretable categories for targeted feedback.
Conclusions:
- A validated methodology for creating interpretable metrics for technical skills in robotic-assisted surgery was established.
- This framework enables surgical trainees to better understand specific areas for improvement and how to achieve them.
