Toward Personalized Training and Skill Assessment in Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery

Despite the immense technology advancement in the surgeries the criteria of assessing the surgical skills still remains based on subjective standards. With the advent of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS), new opportunities for objective and autonomous skill assessment is introduced. Previous works in this area are mostly based on structured-based method such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) which need enormous pre-processing. In this study, in contrast with them, we develop a new shaped-based framework for automatically skill assessment and personalized surgical training with minimum parameter tuning. Our work has addressed main aspects of skill evaluation; develop gesture recognition model directly on temporal kinematic signal of robotic-assisted surgery, and build automated personalized RMIS gesture training framework which . We showed that our method, with an average accuracy of 82% for suturing, 70% for needle passing and 85% for knot tying, performs better or equal than the state-of-the-art methods, while simultaneously needs minimum pre-processing, parameter tuning and provides surgeons with online feedback for their performance during training.