Acquisition of Process Descriptions from Surgical Interventions

The recording and analysis of process descriptions from running surgical interventions is a very new and promising field named

Surgical Workflows

. Surgical Workflows fulfill two major objectives: they form the base of scientific evaluation and rapid prototyping of surgical assist systems, and they pave the road for the entering of workflow management systems into the operating room for intraoperative support of the surgeon. In this paper we describe how process descriptions from surgical interventions can be obtained for Surgical Process Modelling (SPM) as a specific domain of Business Process Modelling (BPM). After the introduction into the field of Surgical Workflows and the motivation of the research efforts, we deal with theoretical considerations about surgical interventions and the identification of classifications. Based on that, we propose the extendable structure for computational data acquisition support and conclude with use cases. The presented approach was applied to more than 200 surgical interventions of 10 different intervention types from otorhinolaryngology, neurosurgery, heart surgery, eye surgery, and interventional radiology, and it represents an ongoing project.