Endoshare: A Publicly Available, Surgeons-Friendly Solution to De-Identify and Manage Surgical Videos

TL;DR

Endoshare is a user-friendly, publicly available tool that standardizes, de-identifies, and manages surgical videos to facilitate training, research, and quality improvement while addressing privacy concerns.

Contribution

This work introduces Endoshare, a novel, surgeon-friendly application for surgical video management that merges, standardizes, and de-identifies videos with high usability and acceptance.

Findings

High usability scores from clinicians and computer scientists.

Positive perceived usefulness and ease of use reported by surgeons.

Processing time scales with video duration and is optimized in fast mode.

Abstract

Video-based assessment and surgical data science can advance surgical training, research, and quality improvement, yet adoption remains limited by heterogeneous recording formats and privacy concerns linked to video sharing. This work develops, evaluates, and publicly releases Endoshare, a surgeon-friendly application that merges, standardizes, and de-identifies endoscopic videos. Development followed an iterative, user-centered software life cycle. In the analysis phase, an internal survey of four clinicians and four computer scientists, based on 10 usability heuristics, identified early requirements and guided a cross-platform, privacy-by-design architecture. Prototype testing reported high usability for clinicians (4.68 +/- 0.40 out of 5) and for computer scientists (4.03 +/- 0.51 out of 5), with the lowest score (4.00 +/- 0.93 out of 5) relating to label clarity, prompting interface refinement to streamline case selection, video merging, automated out-of-body removal, and filename pseudonymization. In the testing phase, ten surgeons completed an external survey combining the same heuristics with Technology Acceptance Model constructs, reporting high perceived usefulness (5.07 +/- 1.75 out of 7), ease of use (5.15 +/- 1.71 out of 7), heuristic usability (4.38 +/- 0.48 out of 5), and strong recommendation likelihood (9.20 +/- 0.79 out of 10). A performance assessment across different hardware and configurations showed that processing time increased proportionally with video duration and was consistently lower in fast mode. Endoshare is a publicly available solution to manage surgical videos, with potential to support training, research, and quality improvement. Compliance certification and broader interoperability validation are needed to establish it as a reliable tool for surgical video management. The software is available at https://camma-public.github.io/Endoshare