Many times it's hard to get experts to tell you what they do. Because they're so good at it it becomes
automated and it actually makes it difficult for them to verbalize it or remember that it's even important or that
someone who's just beginning doesn't know how to do that.
We are at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress meeting and we are in exhibit booth 1625.
This is the Surgical Metrics Project, the first time ever that the American College of Surgeons has partnered
with a university to do a pilot study around actually quantifying the surgical process.
A lot of what we do as surgeons is somewhat complex.
So if we have data that represents all of the nuances of that
process we can better communicate what it is that we do. It will greatly facilitate
training. It will greatly
facilitate development of new technologies. If we decided at any point to either self-evaluate for efficiency
or to evaluate one another for efficiency
we need to have a baseline of what it looks like
to deviate in either direction. The big goal is to bring surgeons to this conversation,
help them to understand the different data streams that are possible, help them to understand the data and
help them to have a voice in the conversation about how data is used
and how it can benefit what they do when they're taking care of patients.
Someone will approach the table because they are interested in the appearance of our booth or because
they notice that there's some surgical simulation going on, which tends to be something that people are really
interested and engage in and then we talk to them about this study, about what we're hoping to
accomplish. And then we would bring them over to the area where they do the cognitive testing. So the
cognitive testing includes having an EEG electrode placed on their forehead and there are three
components to it. So there's a memory component, a reaction time component and a meditative component.
And the idea behind the cognitive testing is to sort of get a baseline of their EEG when they're thinking
through these different components. Now once we have a baseline of that from the cognitive component they
move on to the technical skills. We are
using a combination of wearable technologies and other data collection
technologies including motion tracking which will give us 3D data in terms of the working volume of every
small and large movement that the surgeon makes. We're combining that with video data from
multiple views and it's synchronized. And we're also collecting audio data, what they say, and then we're also
collecting EEG data. After they repair the enterotomy there is a leak test done.
And so we infuse fluid into the bowel where we clamp it at one end and at the other end and we
Infuse fluid in and we see if anything leaks out. So that's
effectively going to tell us if it was a successful repair of the enterotomy. So not only have we captured their
movement, their EEG, the video and the audio, we have a sense of whether or not it was technically successful.
What's important about this data is
it should be looked at as an opportunity for information exchange. And I think that that's why
it's important to start with the simulation. This is not something that's going to be used as a record of care.
Starting here and bringing the physicians together will help us embark on the
conversation as opposed to waiting until the conversation is imposed upon us.