Data Warehousing Technology for Surgical Workflow Analysis

Analysis of surgical procedures is an emerging domain of medical engineering aimed at advancing surgical assist systems. The term Surgical Workflows is used for describing the methodical framework for acquiring formal descriptions of surgical interventions. A formal model and a uniform recording scheme of a surgical process are crucial for systematic accumulation of relevant data from running surgical instances in a form, appropriate for analysis. This paper describes the process of designing a data warehouse for surgical workflow analysis. Data warehousing technology, originally developed for quantitative business data analysis for the purpose of decision making, is adaptable to the requirements of surgical data and analysis. We describe a conceptual model of a surgical procedure obtained in accordance with the multidimensional data model. We demonstrate how a subject-oriented multidimensional perspective of a surgery and its components enables powerful analysis and exploration by defining the metrics of interests and aggregating those metrics along various dimensions and levels of details. Apart from its primary function, i.e. quantitative analysis, the data of the surgical data warehouse may serve as input for other data-intensive systems, e.g. visualization and data mining tools.