Rule-based medical device adaptation for the digital operating room.

A workflow-driven cooperative operating room needs to be established in order to successfully unburden the surgeon and the operating room staff very time-consuming information-seeking and configuration tasks. We propose an approach towards the integration of intraoperative surgical workflow management and integration technologies. The concept of rule-based behavior is adapted to situation-aware medical devices. A prototype was implemented and experiments with sixty recorded brain tumor removal procedures were conducted to test the proposed approach. An analysis of the recordings indicated numerous applications, such as automatic display configuration, room light adaptation and pre-configuration of medical devices and systems.