Hands Collaboration Evaluation for Surgical Skills Assessment: An Information Theoretical Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bimanual tasks, where the brain must simultaneously control and plan the movements of both hands, such as needle passing and tissue cutting, commonly exist in surgeries, e.g., robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. In this study, we present a novel approach for quantifying the quality of hands coordination and correspondence in bimanual tasks by utilizing information theory concepts to build a mathematical framework for measuring the collaboration strength between the two hands. The introduced method makes no assumption about the dynamics and couplings within the robotic platform, executive task, or human motor control. We implemented the proposed approach on MEELS and JIGSAWS datasets, corresponding to conventional minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and robot-assisted MIS, respectively. We analyzed the advantages of hands collaboration features in the skills assessment and style recognition of robotic surgery tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrated that incorporating intuitive domain knowledge of bimanual tasks potentially paves the way for other complex applications, including, but not limited to, autonomous surgery with a high level of model explainability and interpretability. Finally, we presented preliminary results to argue that incorporating hands collaboration features in deep learning-based classifiers reduces uncertainty, improves accuracy, and enhances the out-of-distribution robustness of the final model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".