Towards development of a tele‐mentoring framework for minimally invasive surgeries
Dehlela Shabir, Nihal Abdurahiman, Jhasketan Padhan, May Trinh, Shidin Balakrishnan, Mohamed Kurer, Omar Ali, Abdulla Al‐Ansari, Elias Yaacoub, Zhigang Deng, Aiman Erbad, Amr Mohammed, Nikhil V. Navkar
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Tele-mentoring facilitates the transfer of surgical knowledge. The objective of this work is to develop a tele-mentoring framework that enables a specialist surgeon to mentor an operating surgeon by transferring information in a form of surgical instruments' motion required during a minimally invasive surgery. METHOD: A tele-mentoring framework is developed to transfer video stream of the surgical field, poses of the scope and port placement from the operating room to a remote location. From the remote location, the motion of virtual surgical instruments augmented onto the surgical field is sent to the operating room. RESULTS: The proposed framework is suitable to be integrated with laparoscopic as well as robotic surgeries. It takes on average 1.56 s to send information from the operating room to the remote location and 0.089 s for vice versa over a local area network. CONCLUSIONS: The work demonstrates a tele-mentoring framework that enables a specialist surgeon to mentor an operating surgeon during a minimally invasive surgery.