One percent of children born in Sweden are born with some type of heart defect, and half a percent require surgical care. Researchers within NextG2Com are running projects together with doctors at the Children’s Heart Center in Lund to develop robotic assistance for heart surgery to improve care.
During the study visit, the participants saw the operating room equipped with video equipment used by the NextG2Com-associated project CAISA for recording surgeries and collecting data for machine learning. Project CAISA is led by Chief of Surgery Kiet Tran and Maj Stenmark, associate senior lecturer in robotics. The purpose of the CAISA project (Collaborative Artificial Intelligent Surgical Assistant) is to develop a robotic assistant for the operating room. The initial goals are to teach the robot to recognize instruments and certain anatomical structures in the heart, and to develop a robotic system that can correctly hand over the right instrument. Large amounts of data are needed for the learning process, and the recorded operations form the foundation for this.
Educational purposes
At the same time, Kiet Tran describes the benefits of the recordings for daily work and educational purposes. Displaying the video live on a screen during surgery has been shown to improve communication in the operating room, and the recorded material can be used for reviewing special cases and for training. The volume training a surgeon needs to maintain skills for certain types of surgeries is difficult to achieve in Sweden purely in terms of numbers, which makes the opportunity to study recorded material crucial for continued education and skills retention.
After visiting the cardiology and operating departments, the participants continued to the tissue bank and its state-of-the-art facilities for research and development. They discussed their impressions of how the operating wards are organized and identified specific areas and use cases where automation and robotics could play a role in the future.