An AI Coach for Enhancing Teamwork in the Cardiac Operating Room

Overview

Cardiac surgery is often needed to address some of the most serious heart problems, resulting in administration of more than 900,000 cardiac procedures each year. The cardiac Operating Room (OR) is a complex environment where healthcare professionals from multiple disciplines -- including surgeons, anesthesiologists, perfusionists, and nurses -- collaborate to administer this life-critical care. To successfully administer care, all members of the surgical team are expected to perform their tasks in lockstep and with full awareness of dynamic situations encountered during surgery. However, achieving such ideal teamwork is difficult in the complex environment of cardiac OR, where human performance is adversely affected by factors such as high workload, fatigue, and interruptions or disruptions during surgery. This project addresses an urgent need for mitigating these preventable human errors and improving patient safety through the design of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled coaching system (AI Coach) for monitoring, assessing, and enhancing surgical teamwork in the cardiac OR. Central to the functioning of the AI Coach will be a set of novel machine learning and explainable artificial intelligence algorithms to computationally generate interpretable feedback and interventions for enhancing surgical teamwork based on multimodal sensor data.

Funding

NSF Award Number: 2310187

Collaborators

  • Prof. Roger D. Dias, PhD, MBA, MD
  • Prof. Eduardo Salas, PhD
  • Prof. Julie Shah, PhD
  • Prof. Vaibhav Unhelkar, PhD

Publications & Presentations

See also: