Surgical data science, an emerging field of medicine

Abstract

Computer Assisted Surgery (CAS) significantly changed the course of interventional medicine. The development of medical imaging opened up the possibility for accurate, patient specific planning, and advanced imaging techniques provided the ground for the development of real-time navigation systems. The advancement of minimally invasive surgical techniques and tools required increasing manuality from the surgeon, which facilitated the development of tele-robotic manipulation. These systems provide a vast amount of objective inta-operative data, thus many believe that the next step could be big data analysis for creating and evaluating surgical process models. This emerging field of medicine, called Surgical Data Science, has the potential to improve intervetional medicine with objective statistical analysis, and therefore to provide better patient outcomes and a reduction in healthcare costs.