A new course at Hopkins BME combines principles of data science, systems engineering, and human factors with clinical immersion in interventional medicine at Hopkins Hospital. In the first run of the course – Surgineering, students from BME and Computer Science underwent clinical immersion in Neurosurgery, Orthopaedic Surgery, General Surgery, Otolaryngology, Interventional Radiology, and Radiation Oncology to identify systems-level challenges in workflow, patient safety, and data capture. Their aim: bury complexity in the operating theatre and develop systems for continuous data capture, curation, and learning.

The course concluded with final projects, including:

– Workflow Simulation in MR-Guided Neurosurgery. Surgineers Sarah Capostagno and Nicole Chernavskyused FlexSimHealth to model the IMRIS operating theatre and identify improvements to workflow, efficiency, and safety.

– An NLP Assistant for EPIC Integration. Surgineers Brian Morris and Patrick Myers used Alexa voice recognition to perform efficient queries on data retrieval in EPIC.

– State Prediction Using Anesthesia Data Monitoring. Surgineers Prasad Vagdargi and Gabriel Anfinrud developed a machine learning classification method to classify OR status according to signals read from the anesthesia gas cart.

– Surgical Instruments Recognition. Surgineers Runze Han and Sophia Doerr developed a neural network image classification method to automatically recognize tools on the OR back table, creating a platform for numerous applications to enhance workflow and improve OR setup.

Clinical mentors at Johns Hopkins Hospital provided deep clinical insight on real-life clinical problems: Dr. Mike Marohn and Dr. Gina Adrales in General Surgery; Dr. Greg Osgood in Orthopaedic Surgery; Dr. Nick Theodore in Neurosurgery; Dr. Cliff Weiss in Interventional Radiology; Dr. Akila Viswanathan in Radiation Oncology; and Dr. John Carey and Dr. Fancis Creighton in Otolaryngology.

Congratulations, Surgineers! on an outstanding semester.