Model driven design of workflow schemata for the operating room of the future

Abstract

Many assistance systems are available in modern operating rooms. These systems are poorly interconnected to each other and therefore cannot provide their information in a context sensitive manner. Those systems need to be considered as distributed systems when targeting the development of an workflow management systems to pilot the control flow between surgical assist systems. To achieve the best possible interaction between the systems the workflow management engine needs a reliable description of the underlying process. Because of the high variability of the surgical process a top-down approach cannot be used. In this article we describe a model driven approach to create a workflow schema out of a Surgical Process Model (SPM).