Towards an Efficient Computational Framework for Surgical Skill Assessment: Suturing Task by Kinematic Data

Abstract

During the course of the residency, novice surgeons develop specific skills before they perform actual surgical procedures. Manual feedback and assessment in basic robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) training take up much of the expert surgeons’ time, while it is very favorable to automatically feedback to all surgeons in various skill levels. Towards this end, we use the surgical robot kinematic dataset named JIGSAWS, a public database collected from Da Vinci robot operated by 7 surgeons, to extract 49 metrics for the suturing task using three types of features, namely time and motion-based, entropy-based, and frequency-based. To find out the most relevant metrics in skill assessment, we perform and compare two feature selection/reduction methods, namely principal component analysis (PCA) and relief algorithm. We separately reduce the features based on these two methods, while using a combination method. Although resulting in an acceptable accuracy of 84% when using each separately, the combination method results in 92% particularly noteworthy accuracy.