A Formal Approach For Modelling And Analysing Surgical Procedures (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal, automated method for modeling and analyzing surgical procedures by treating them as security ceremonies, enabling detection of variants and errors in surgical workflows.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formal approach that models surgical procedures as security ceremonies, facilitating automated analysis of variants and mistakes.

Findings

Automated identification of violations in surgical procedures

Modeling of procedure variants and errors

Application of security analysis techniques to surgery

Abstract

Surgical procedures are often not "standardised" (i.e., defined in a unique and unambiguous way), but rather exist as implicit knowledge in the minds of the surgeon and the surgical team. This reliance extends to pre-surgery planning and effective communication during the procedure. We introduce a novel approach for the formal and automated analysis of surgical procedures, which we model as security ceremonies, leveraging well-established techniques developed for the analysis of such ceremonies. Mutations of a procedure are used to model variants and mistakes that members of the surgical team might make. Our approach allows us to automatically identify violations of the intended properties of a surgical procedure.