Authors:

Ryan Toy

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

Non-Technical Skills (NTS) in surgeries like leadership, communication, decision making, and situation awareness are critical for safe procedures. The current standard for assessing NTS are behavioral markers like the Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS) system. The NOTSS system uses expert human raters to qualitatively measure performance across all elements of NTS. The cost of human raters and potential for bias necessitates more efficient and objective measurements for elements of NTS. In this work, over 30 laparoscopic or robotic assisted surgeries were observed. Microphones and cameras captured audio and video recordings. Surgeons' eye tracking and operating room (OR) staff position data was also captured. The audio data is particularly useful in analyzing communication in the OR. Computer programs provide transcripts of the audio recordings. The transcripts were then annotated for closed loop communication (CLC), a standard communication strategy in the medical field. These transcript annotations of CLC give objective measurements of frequency and forms of CLC throughout the operation. Eye tracking data is also especially useful for measuring surgeon's situation awareness. Information about the surgeon's pupil dilation and gaze focus can be used as a metric for cognitive activity during specific parts of the procedure. This study is a work-in- progress and developing better metrics for assessing NTS elements in surgeries will help improve the performance of surgeons and lead to better patient outcomes.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Ryan Toy