Real Time State Estimation of Surgical Energy Devices for Use in an Integrated Operating Room

Abstract

Integrated operating rooms (OR) have shown to be promising in meeting the challenges created by the increased complexity in the OR, by improving the quality of care, simplifying the clinical workflows, and reducing equipment-related incidents and surgical errors. Although several systems that integrate medical devices have been developed, surgical energy devices have yet to be integrated into these systems. Current measurement systems of surgical energy devices are not yet suitable for this integration, due to a lack of being manufacturer-independent and being limited in the amount of measured information. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is the development of a manufacturer-independent measuring system that can estimate and communicate the state of any surgical energy device in real time. To realize this goal, a measurement system has been developed that measures the state of any surgical energy device through image recognition. The system is integrated into the OPeLiNK system of the Smart Cyber Operating Theatre, SCOT. It can however, be integrated in any of the other integrated ORs. The system has been tested through several experiments, showing that the accuracy and measuring speed meet the requirements of 90% and 0.2s. The system outperforms the state of the art in the amount of data that is being measured in real time at the cost of a small delay of 0.07s. Currently the bottleneck is the communication through the OPeLiNK system, where the communication frequency has a set limit of 1Hz. It can be concluded that the developed measurement system can be used for the integration of surgical energy devices in the integrated operating room. The next step is to further improve the system in terms of robustness, easier use, and increased measurement capabilities.