Development of Surgery Recorder System for Minimally Invasive Surgery

An unique concept of the total recording method to improve safeness during the minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is proposed. MIS has been increasing the number of clinical cases with wide spread of public interest in rapid recovery from surgical diseases. Then the risk of clinical accidents will also be raised for a reason that shortage in supply of standard clinical treatments will lead to complications or mortal cases associated with misjudgments of surgeons. Actually, specific accidents in MIS have been increasing, but there is no efficient methodology of quantitative analysis for accidents, even the standard format for surgical record including operative procedure. Therefore, we developed the surgery recorder system (SRS), which gives clinical review process an objective way of identifying the causes of accidents. The concept of the SRS is based on the "flight recorder with voice/video recorder" in the operating theater. SRS records surgery information including position/orientation (P/O) and force/torque (F/T) signals of surgical tools, an endoscopic vision and surrounding sounds as well as vital data of the patient in the operating theater (A/V information). A prototype of laparoscopic forceps for P/O and F/T sensing was newly developed with care for consistency with commercial forceps. Then, in-vivo pig experiments were also performed by an expert of laparoscopic surgery for testing SRS. False and rough operative approaches to diaphragm and liver by a skill-ful surgeon were analyzed quantitatively in a postoperative investigation.