Motion Analysis of Surgeons' Movements

Introduction

For efficient design of surgical instruments, studies of the movements that are made by surgeons during routine tasks can highlight problems in design. Research in the Surgical Skills Unit at the University of Dundee studies these movements with new designs of instrument handles. For more details please see the department homepage.

Motion Analysis

A Kinemetrix motion analysis system was used to collect data over a 60 second period as surgeons performed standard tasks. The system is normally used for gait analysis, so the software provided did not perform the sort of detailed calculations that were required for the project. My involvement with the project was to write a MATLAB program to interpret the data.

The Program

The program was split into two main parts: the user interface and the data processing. As the script would be used by people without much knowledge of MATLAB, a clear UI was needed. This consisted of a graph window, and a series of clearly labelled buttons to load and save data. A drop-down box selected the current function.

The data processing was performed by a series of callback functions. Initially, data was imported from ASCII files with raw marker positions. This was then split into the known marker positions (clavicle, shoulder, elbow and two wrist markers). From this data such as angle at the elbow, angle at the shoulder, angular velocities and statistical information about these could be obtained and saved.