Beyond role-based surgical domain modeling: Generalizable re-identification in the operating room

Surgical domain models seek to optimize the surgical workflow through the incorporation of each staff member's role. However, mounting evidence indicates that team familiarity and individuality impact surgical outcomes. We present a novel staff-centric modeling approach that characterizes individual team members through their distinctive movement patterns and physical characteristics, enabling long-term tracking and analysis of surgical personnel across multiple procedures. To address the challenge of inter-clinic variability, we develop a generalizable re-identification framework that encodes sequences of 3D point clouds to capture shape and articulated motion patterns unique to each individual. Our method achieves 86.19% accuracy on realistic clinical data while maintaining 75.27% accuracy when transferring between different environments - a 12% improvement over existing methods. When used to augment markerless personnel tracking, our approach improves accuracy by over 50%, addressing failure modes including occlusions and personnel re-entering the operating room. Through extensive validation across three datasets and the introduction of a novel workflow visualization technique, we demonstrate how our framework can reveal novel insights into surgical team dynamics and space utilization patterns, advancing methods to analyze surgical workflows and team coordination.