Neurosurgery

Background

While several metrics have been employed to characterize different phases of surgical movements in laparoscopy, the extremely small movements and sizes involved in neurosurgery (working field is usually 280-370 [mm2] x h5-10[cm], target size 0.2-1.5[mm]) have prevented until now the development of similar methodologies and systems. Therefore, based on the extremely reduced weight and size of WB-3 IMU, it could be mounted on the bipolar forceps of neurosurgery, and to be used during normal tasks without disturbing surgeon's performance. As a preliminary experimental setup in Fig. 1, we applied WB-3 IMU to a bipolar forceps (Fig. 2), the most commonly used instrument in neurosurgery, and we used the skill evaluation system (Fig. 3) to analyze the movements of neurosurgeons in a simple pick and place scenario.

Objective

Our aim is to develop evaluation tools and methodology that allow the characterization of the neurosurgeon's movements during surgery, and to evaluate the improvement of the performance over training.

Results

The preliminary results proved that several parameters extracted from the IMU’s data (and in particular the PSD and the CDF of both acceleration and angular speed) allow a clear distinction between a professional neurosurgeon and a group of novices; moreover, these data also could show which non-medical subject performs similarly to the surgeon, and how, thus validating the approach proposed in this pilot study.

Relevant Publications

  • M. Zecca, S. Sessa, Z. Lin, T. Sasaki, T. Suzuki, K. Itoh, H. Iseki, and A. Takanishi, “Development of an Ultra-Miniaturized Inertial Measurement Unit for Objective Skill Analysis and Assessment in Neurosurgery: preliminary results”, Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention 5761, MICCAI 2009, Part I, pp. 443-500, 2009. [PDF]
  • S. Sessa, M. Zecca, Z. Lin, T. Sasaki, T. Suzuki, K. Itoh, H. Iseki, and A. Takanishi, Objective Skill Analysis and Assessment of Neurosurgery by using the Waseda Bioinstrumentation System WB-3 - Pilot tests, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems IROS2009, St. Louis, MO, USA, 2009, pp. 4086-4091.
  • Z. Lin, M. Zecca, S. Sessa, T. Sasaki, T. Suzuki, K. Itoh, H. Iseki, and A. Takanishi, Objective Skill Analysis and Assessment in Neurosurgery by Using an Ultra-Miniaturized Inertial Measurement Unit WB-3 - Pilot tests, in 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC'09), Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2009, pp. 2320-2323.