Evaluating the surgeon's stress when using surgical assistant robots

Abstract

We propose a method for using surgeon's biological information to evaluate the surgeon's stress in his/her using a surgical assistant system. The surgeon's biological information were saliva and heart rate. The stress was measured by analyzing Cortisol, alpha-amylase, and total protein in saliva, and we analyzed the acceleration plethysmogram variability as the indexes of autonomic nervous activity, those were coefficient of variance of the a-a interval and low-frequency band power spectrum(LF), high-frequency band power spectrum (HF), the ratio of LF to HF (LF/HF). To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted a laparoscopic cholecystectomy simulation. In conclusion, we confirmed our method had an ability to objectively evaluate the surgeon's stress during surgery.