RFID-based surgical instrument detection using Hidden Markov models

Abstract

This paper is about instrument localization in the operating room during surgeries. The main purpose of the proposed system is the automatic determination of the possible instrument usage information for automatic surgical workflow recording. The approach is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sensor fusion methods and Hidden Markov models (HMM). The Results show high accuracy for instrument localization and demonstrate the ability of the system to replace manually recorded instrument usage information. © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston.