Situation Awareness in Neurosurgery: A User Modeling Approach

Situation awareness is a perception of the available information, events, resources, and environment within a given time and space. Humans have limited abilities to obtain and maintain situation awareness, as they need to carefully orchestrate the available resources. A failure to maintain situation awareness may lead to serious errors in human behavior. Investigation of the situation awareness of neurosurgeons using cognitive architectures is a new and exciting application of computational user modeling. Accurately modeling of the surgeons’ behavior and their mental states while they perform operations using miniature instruments and movements require various implicit measures of the surgeons’ behavior. The user modeling community has been searching for such data sources in other domains and have indicated that eye-tracking, as a noninvasive methodology, can be used to enrich the user models and increase their quality. In this research I will 1) investigate what are the constituents of situation awareness during neurosurgery, 2) how eye-tracking methodologies fit to created suitable user models of situation awareness, and 3) how data should be processed, and what features of eye-tracking data work best. We propose to use eye tracking techniques to develop a comprehensive computational model of the surgeons’ behavior. The model will be further interpreted, to understand how information, events, and surgeons’ actions will impact neurosurgery operations.