Quantitative analysis and prediction of surgical progress contributes to understanding and improvement of surgical procedure, environment, and effective scheduling. We developed the method for process progress analysis of surgical procedure. Intraoperative MRI-guided glioma surgery with surgical navigation system was analyzed. Surgical navigation system provides accurate information regarding the patient’s anatomy and the surgical procedure during the surgery. We analyzed the progress of tumor resection and predicted the end time of resection by using this information. The resected region of the tumor was defined by interference analysis between tumor surface determined from MRI images and the location log data of surgical tools. Thus, we estimated resection progress based on the ratio of resected region to the total tumor surface. Moreover, based on the stage of completion and the time elapsed since the commencement of resection, we predicted the end time of tumor resection. Evaluation of 4 clinical cases revealed that our method could analyze the progress of resection quantitatively and automatically, and predict the end time of resection with average error of 15-minutes during an 89-minutes procedure. This result indicated that spatiotemporal information of surgical navigation is useful not only for assistance in but also for analysis of the surgical procedure. Thus, our process progress analysis method may be applied for intraoperative evaluation of surgical procedures.

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