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Purpose: Recent advances in Surgical Data Science (SDS) have contributed to an increase in video recordings from hospital environments. While methods such as surgical workflow recognition show potential in increasing the quality of patient care, the quantity of video data has surpassed the scale at which images can be manually anonymized. Existing automated 2D anonymization methods under-perform in Operating Rooms (OR), due to occlusions and obstructions. We propose to anonymize multi-view OR recordings using 3D data from multiple camera streams., Methods: RGB and depth images from multiple cameras are fused into a 3D point cloud representation of the scene. We then detect each individual's face in 3D by regressing a parametric human mesh model onto detected 3D human keypoints and aligning the face mesh with the fused 3D point cloud. The mesh model is rendered into every acquired camera view, replacing each individual's face., Results: Our method shows promise in locating faces at a higher rate than existing approaches. DisguisOR produces geometrically consistent anonymizations for each camera view, enabling more realistic anonymization that is less detrimental to downstream tasks., Conclusion: Frequent obstructions and crowding in operating rooms leaves significant room for improvement for off-the-shelf anonymization methods. DisguisOR addresses privacy on a scene level and has the potential to facilitate further research in SDS., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Purpose: Mutual acceptance is required for any human-to-human interaction. Therefore, one would assume that this also holds for robot-patient interactions. However, the medical robotic imaging field lacks research in the area of acceptance. This work, therefore, aims at analyzing the influence of robot-patient interactions on acceptance in an exemplary medical robotic imaging system., Methods: We designed an interactive human-robot scenario, including auditive and gestural cues, and compared this pipeline to a non-interactive scenario. Both scenarios were evaluated through a questionnaire to measure acceptance. Heart rate monitoring was also used to measure stress. The impact of the interaction was quantified in the use case of robotic ultrasound scanning of the neck., Results: We conducted the first user study on patient acceptance of robotic ultrasound. Results show that verbal interactions impacts trust more than gestural ones. Furthermore, through interaction, the robot is perceived to be friendlier. The heart rate data indicates that robot-patient interaction could reduce stress., Conclusions: Robot-patient interactions are crucial for improving acceptance in medical robotic imaging systems. While verbal interaction is most important, the preferred interaction type and content are participant dependent. Heart rate values indicate that such interactions can also reduce stress. Overall, this initial work showed that interactions improve patient acceptance in medical robotic imaging, and other medical robot-patient systems can benefit from the design proposals to enhance acceptance in interactive scenarios., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Purpose: The staging of female breast cancer requires detailed information about the level of cancer spread through the lymphatic system. Common practice to obtain this information for patients with early-stage cancer is sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy, where LNs are radioactively identified for surgical removal and subsequent histological analysis. Punch needle biopsy is a less invasive approach but suffers from the lack of combined anatomical and nuclear information. We present and evaluate a system that introduces live collaborative robotic 2D gamma imaging in addition to live 2D ultrasound to identify SLNs in the surrounding anatomy., Methods: The system consists of a robotic arm equipped with both a gamma camera and a stereoscopic tracking system that monitors the position of an ultrasound probe operated by the physician. The arm cooperatively places the gamma camera parallel to the ultrasound imaging plane to provide live multimodal visualization and guidance. We validate the system by evaluating the target registration errors between fused nuclear and US image data in a phantom consisting of two spheres, one of which is filled with radioactivity. Medical experts perform punch biopsies on agar-gelatine phantoms with complex configurations of hot and cold lesions to provide a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the system., Results: The average point registration error for the overlay is [Formula: see text] mm. The time of the entire procedure was reduced by 36 %, with 80v of the biopsies being successful. The users' feedback was very positive, and the system was deemed to be very intuitive, with handling similar to classic US-guided needle biopsy., Conclusion: We present and evaluate the first medical collaborative robotic imaging system. Feedback from potential users for SLN punch needle biopsy is encouraging. Ongoing work investigates the clinical feasibility with more complex and realistic phantoms.