Evidence from the surgeons: gesture control of image data displayed during surgery

ABSTRACT

We gathered ethnographic evidence from surgeons about the concept of gesture-based control over the display of their patients’ radiographic scan data during surgery. This would give the surgeons direct access to their patients’ scan data without compromising their sterile working field and without needing to rely on other clinicians to interpret display instructions. Our approach involved interviewing surgeons and observing them in the operating theatre. We included evidence from earlier publications in this field and we used a grounded theory approach to analyse our data. Our findings address diversity across the surgical specialties, preoperative versus intraoperative use of the data, preferences for simple natural gestures, the role of another person controlling the display, broad system constraints and the willingness of surgeons to collaborate with their time and effort in this research.

KEYWORDS:

• Information technology in the operating theatre
• gesture control
• ethnographic study of surgeons
• natural user interfaces

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the assistance of Ms Diana Shaw (The Canberra Hospital) and Dr Chris Harris (Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne). Ms Olivia Nguyen, a graduate student at ANU, assisted with observations in the operating theatre and Dr Yuchao Dai (ANU) developed a Kinect-based demonstration of gesture interactions with radiography data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project (LP100100588) in partnership with Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft Research.