Surgical Workflow Software Infrastructure Based on Business Workflow Modeling Standards

Thesis by: open
Advisor: Prof. Nassir Navab
Supervision by: Ralf Stauder, Daniel Ostler (MITI)
Due date: tba

Abstract

Surgical procedures can be described and structured by their workflow, phases, and hierarchical order of tasks and activities. This enables further analysis and comparison both of ongoing surgeries as well as for recorded datasets. Several methods for modeling of business processes have already been established, though due to the different methodical approach in this case, the available methods are not necessarily directly applicable to surgical process modeling.

The aim of this work is to implement a common class structure suitable for surgical workflows and develop import and export functions to and from several known languages describing business process models (e.g. YAWL and BPMN). During the course of the implementation these languages should be evaluated for their fitness to describe surgical workflows with their specific requirements (e.g. variability in the process and probabilistic phase transitions).