A pattern catalogue of surgical interventions for computer-supported operation planning.

In this paper we present a new operation planning system which was evaluated in the clinic for Cranio-Maxillo-Facial-Surgery at the University of Heidelberg. In opposite to commercial systems our goal was, that the system considers the complete surgical intervention and not only a single procedure of it. A second goal was, that the system enables managing of complex operations, independent of which way the intervention will be intraoperatively performed (without technical support, with passive navigation support or active support by robots). Our system supports the surgeon during the preoperative planning as well as during the intraoperative execution phase. Therefore we developed a course model by which the managing of surgical interventions is possible. The focus of this paper is on this course model. At first we introduce instruction graphs and describe the structure of each activity observing its attributes and their context. Additionally, various surgical scopes will be presented which enable the surgeon to select one view among different ones of the individual operation procedures in accordance to medical and technical knowledge as well as in accordance to different degrees of abstraction. At last we demonstrate operation patterns, used as expert knowledge.