UB team leads $1.1 million subcontract to improve surgical skills training

A UB-team led by industrial engineer Lora Cavuoto has received $1.1 million in funding as a subcontractor on a new grant aiming to improve surgical skills among the medical student population.

“Artificially Intelligent Agents for Investigating Methods for Performance Overdrive (IMPROVE)” seeks to develop an AI-based paradigm that will monitor the brain activity of future surgeons during their training to uncover how well they are mastering new surgical techniques. 

The UB subcontract is sponsored by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) who received $2.2 million in total funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command of the U.S. Department of Defense. 

In addition to Cavuoto, an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the UB team includes Steven Schwaitzberg (Professor and Chair, Department of Surgery) and Anirban Dutta (Associate Professor of Research, Department of Biomedical Engineering). They will be responsible for the coordination and collection of data, which will then be shared with researchers at RPI for their use in developing deep learning models for objective skill assessment and targeted training.

“This project will contribute to our understanding of how surgical skill develops through the connection of the brain and corresponding task performance,” said Cavuoto. "By knowing how skill develops, we can ensure that a trainee gets enough practice to reach proficiency and we can work toward feedback systems that target specific components for skill improvement."

The team is preparing their equipment for data collection and will start the process within the next few weeks. The project will continue into April of next year.