Applying artificial intelligence on EDA sensor data to predict stress on minimally invasive robotic-assisted surgery

This study aims predicting the stress level based on the ergonomic (kinematic) and physiological (electrodermal activity-EDA, blood pressure and body temperature) parameters of the surgeon from their records collected in the previously immediate situation of a minimally invasive robotic surgery activity.

For this purpose, data related to the surgeon's ergonomic and physiological parameters were collected during twenty-six robotic-assisted surgical sessions completed by eleven surgeons with different experience levels. Once the dataset was generated, two preprocessing techniques were applied (scaled and normalized), these two datasets were divided into two subsets: with 80% of data for training and cross-validation, and 20% of data for test. Three predictive techniques (multiple linear regression-MLR, support vector machine-SVM and multilayer perceptron-MLP) were applied on training dataset to generate predictive models. Finally, these models were validated on cross-validation and test datasets. After each session, surgeons were asked to complete a survey of their feeling of stress. These data were compared with those obtained using predictive models.

The results showed that MLR combined with the scaled preprocessing achieved the highest R² coefficient and the lowest error for each parameter analyzed. Additionally, the results for the surgeons' surveys were highly correlated to the results obtained by the predictive models (R² = 0.8253).

The linear models proposed in this study were successfully validated on cross-validation and test datasets. This fact demonstrates the possibility of predicting factors that help us to improve the surgeon's health during robotic surgery.