Deep neural network architecture for automated soft surgical skills evaluation using objective structured assessment of technical skills criteria.

PURPOSE: Classic methods of surgery skills evaluation tend to classify the surgeon performance in multi-categorical discrete classes. If this classification scheme has proven to be effective, it does not provide in-between evaluation levels. If these intermediate scoring levels were available, they would provide more accurate evaluation of the surgeon trainee. METHODS: We propose a novel approach to assess surgery skills on a continuous scale ranging from 1 to 5. We show that the proposed approach is flexible enough to be used either for scores of global performance or several sub-scores based on a surgical criteria set called Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS). We established a combined CNN+BiLSTM architecture to take advantage of both temporal and spatial features of kinematic data. Our experimental validation relies on real-world data obtained from JIGSAWS database. The surgeons are evaluated on three tasks: Knot-Tying, Needle-Passing and Suturing. The proposed framework of neural networks takes as inputs a sequence of 76 kinematic variables and produces an output float score ranging from 1 to 5, reflecting the quality of the performed surgical task. RESULTS: Our proposed model achieves high-quality OSATS scores predictions with means of Spearman correlation coefficients between the predicted outputs and the ground-truth outputs of 0.82, 0.60 and 0.65 for Knot-Tying, Needle-Passing and Suturing, respectively. To our knowledge, we are the first to achieve this regression performance using the OSATS criteria and the JIGSAWS kinematic data. CONCLUSION: An effective deep learning tool was created for the purpose of surgical skills assessment. It was shown that our method could be a promising surgical skills evaluation tool for surgical training programs.