Acquisition, storage and reconstruction of multidimensional surgical information in a digital operation room environment

Objective. Medical errors were recognized early in the practice of surgery and have been the subject of study for some decades. However, traditional surgical records in current operating rooms do not provide efficient and sufficient information for identifying the root causes of surgical errors. The purposes of this research are to establish and implement a multidimensional surgical information architecture in operating rooms; to design a comprehensive electronic health record system for information storage and presentation; and to build a surgery review platform based on the reconstruction model for surgical evaluation to improve patient safety. Methods. A system entitled Surgical Data Collection, Integration, Storage and Retrieval System (SdCISRS) was designed in this research. The surgical information capture architecture was established based on the clinical and technical considerations of the digital operation room system. A surgical event deconstruction tree was invented to facilitate the surgical event capture. This research implemented specific software and hardware to capture the surgical information including complete digital videos, audios, surgical events, physiological data and radiology images from different medical resources. An electronic health record was successfully implemented to warehouse various surgical information. A hybrid synchronization reconstruction model was invented based on the time-based synchronization and event-based synchronization to rebuild digital operating room scenarios and present the entire multidimensional information. Results. Twenty-one surgery cases were performed using the SdCISRS in this research. The proposed surgical information was successfully acquired, stored and reconstructed in all the cases. The clinical evaluation results verified that the SdCISRS could provide more details for the surgical procedures and better surgery review than the traditional paper-based records. Conclusion. This research successfully designed a digital operation room system as a prototype to capture, store and reconstruct multidimensional surgical information. It may provide a new surgical reporting system for improving patient safety.