With about 250 million surgical procedures worldwide per year, surgical quality is a crucial societal issue. Increasing surgical quality may occur through the whole perioperative process from diagnosis, strategy decision, planning, performance and post-operative evaluation, as well as through initial and continuous learning. Computer assistance is required at each step.
In the presentation, I will present how such objectives can be addressed by studying and understanding surgical skills, following the surgical data science methodology. I will illustrate such approaches by examples covering different aspects of surgical skills from technical to non-technical ones, such as the evaluation of surgical procedural skills, the development of a surgical simulation system for training procedural skills based on an interactive and collaborative virtual reality environment and the study of neurosurgical non-technical skills.
