The doctoral dissertation in the field of Computer Science will be examined at the Faculty of Science and Forestry, Joensuu Campus.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
The topic of my dissertation is the computational evaluation of microsurgical skills. For a long time, the training of new surgeons has occurred through close mentorship by more experienced surgeons. However, changes in legislation have limited the surgeons' working hours, and research findings have highlighted issues with subjectivity and time consumption in the traditional training approaches. In addition, since surgical trainee's rely on the expert surgeon for feedback, they lack opportunities for training independently. This has increased pressure towards developing more automated and objective methods for evaluating surgical skills.
So far, most of this work has been conducted in surgical techniques such as laparoscopy and open surgery. In my dissertation, I focused on microsurgery, more specifically on surgical procedures completed with the surgical microscope.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
Some of the key findings include that monitoring certain conceptually simple, basic actions that the surgeons take during surgical training tasks can reveal differences in surgical skills. We also saw that monitoring the surgeon's pupil dilations via eye tracking could show differences between novices and expert surgeons. Similar results have been obtained in other surgical techniques, but microsurgical techniques have not been investigated as comprehensively.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
Most of the research lays groundwork for future, more automated methods. We envision that methods similar to what have been studied here could be utilized in microsurgical training centres to provide surgical trainees with more opportunities for independent practice.
While the surgical trainee completes surgical training tasks, their performance is monitored with eye tracking and computer vision methods, and the resulting data is then fed into a computer that analyses it and translates it into useful feedback.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
The research was conducted between 2018 - 2022 at the University of Eastern Finland, School of Computing, in close collaboration with the Microsurgery Center at the Kuopio University Hospital. During my research, I also visited the Surgical Simulation Research Lab at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
The research relied mainly on video analysis and eye tracking. We utilized an eye tracker that could be placed at the surgical microscope's ocular, as well as video data that could be recorded directly with the microscope. The eye tracker monitored the surgeons gaze and pupil size changes while they performed microsurgical training tasks. The video recordings showed essentially the same view that the surgeon sees when they are operating with the microscope. By applying modern computer vision methods, as well as more traditional, manual video analysis methods, we could analyze the surgeon's actions and tool use together with their gaze behavior.
The methods allowed us to evaluate how the surgeons handle their tools, how novices and expert surgeons differ in the specific actions they take, how well they can use the tools bi-manually, as well as their eye-hand coordination.The experiments and data collection were conducted at the Surgical Simulation Research Lab and at the Microsurgery Center in KUH.
The doctoral dissertation of Jani Koskinen, MSc, entitled Computational evaluation of microsurgical skills will be examined at the Faculty of Science and Forestry, Joensuu Campus. The opponent will be Professor Marco Zenati, Harvard Medical School, and the custos will be Associate Professor Roman Bednarik University of Eastern Finland. Language of the public defence is English.
For more information, please contact:
Jani Koskinen, jani.koskinen@uef.fi
