title: A step toward identification of surgical actions in mastoidectomy.
abstract: Mastoidectomy is a core surgical procedure in otologic surgery. It is believed that the procedure is performed by different surgeons with some variability. However, it is also believed that all surgeons use a finite number of fundamental surgical actions to complete the procedure. To determine how a surgeon performs a mastoidectomy, we sought to identify the fundamental surgical actions [called action primitives (APs)] and determine the transition boundaries among those APs. Our motivation for this paper is both to delineate the APs necessary to complete a mastoidectomy and to optimize and potentially automate the surgical process. In this paper, we present a new approach to developing methods for parsing raw data (position and orientation of the surgical tool and end-effector force) into a sequence of surgical tasks. The overall objective is to de-construct the surgical procedure into a series of APs. This paper presents results from our initial investigation on detecting transition boundaries and identifying APs involved in mastoidectomy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235-1592, USA. uttama.lahiri@vanderbilt.edu
authors.forename: Uttama
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Lahiri
authors.forename: Robert F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Labadie
authors.forename: Changchun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Ramya
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Balachandran
authors.forename: Omid
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Majdani
authors.forename: Nilanjan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sarkar
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008416:Mastoid / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000601:surgery*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative / Q000379:methods*