Detecting and Analyzing the Surgical Workflow to Aid Human and Robotic Scrub Nurses

Every surgeon and nurse involved in surgery builds a mental model of each type of surgery based on their experiences. This implicit knowledge about the surgical workflow allows them to make decisions based on the current context and predict and prepare future steps. Acquiring this model takes time, therefore experienced scrub nurses are in high demand. Additionally to that, qualified scrub nurses are chronically scarce even in developed countries, which led to the development of robotic surgical assistants. In this paper we give a short introduction to surgical workflow analysis and show, how these methods can be applied to support both the education of human scrub nurses, as well as aid robotic scrub nurses.     «

Every surgeon and nurse involved in surgery builds a mental model of each type of surgery based on their experiences. This implicit knowledge about the surgical workflow allows them to make decisions based on the current context and predict and prepare future steps. Acquiring this model takes time, therefore experienced scrub nurses are in high demand. Additionally to that, qualified scrub nurses are chronically scarce even in developed countries, which led to the development of robotic surgical...     »