International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery
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Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg · Sep 2015
Ultrasound-guided spinal injections: a feasibility study of a guidance system.
Facet joint injections of analgesic agents are widely used to treat patients with lower back pain. The current standard-of-care for guiding the injection is fluoroscopy, which exposes the patient and physician to significant radiation. As an alternative, several ultrasound guidance systems have been proposed, but have not become the standard-of-care, mainly because of the difficulty in image interpretation by the anesthesiologist unfamiliar with the complex spinal sonography. ⋯ The results of this initial feasibility assessment suggest that this ultrasound-based system is capable of providing information sufficient to guide facet joint injections. Further clinical studies are warranted.
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Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg · Sep 2015
LapOntoSPM: an ontology for laparoscopic surgeries and its application to surgical phase recognition.
The rise of intraoperative information threatens to outpace our abilities to process it. Context-aware systems, filtering information to automatically adapt to the current needs of the surgeon, are necessary to fully profit from computerized surgery. To attain context awareness, representation of medical knowledge is crucial. However, most existing systems do not represent knowledge in a reusable way, hindering also reuse of data. Our purpose is therefore to make our computational models of medical knowledge sharable, extensible and interoperational with established knowledge representations in the form of the LapOntoSPM ontology. To show its usefulness, we apply it to situation interpretation, i.e., the recognition of surgical phases based on surgical activities. ⋯ We successfully integrated medical knowledge for laparoscopic surgeries into OntoSPM, facilitating knowledge and data sharing. This is especially important for reproducibility of results and unbiased comparison of recognition algorithms. The associated recognition algorithm was adapted to the new representation without any loss of classification power. The work is an important step to standardized knowledge and data representation in the field on context awareness and thus toward unified benchmark data sets.