Towards Standard Approaches for the Evaluation of Autonomous Surgical Subtask Execution

During the last few decades, Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery reshaped the standard clinical practice. It offers a number of benefits, such as lower risk of complications for the patient and better ergonomics for the surgeon. Many believe that the next big step in the advancement of surgery will be partial autonomy, that may reduce the fatigue and the cognitive load on the surgeon by performing the monotonous, time-consuming subtasks of the surgical procedure autonomously. However, due to the complexity of the environment, the equipment and the workflow, the field of surgical subtask automation found to be quite challenging. Although serious research efforts are payed to this area worldwide, standard evaluation metrics or benchmarking techniques are still not formed. This paper presents a characterization model for surgical automation, and reviews the possible candidates for the standardized evaluation and comparison of automated surgical subtask.