Purpose

Autonomously self-navigating clinical assistance systems (ASCAS) seem highly promising for improving clinical workflows. There is great potential for easing staff workload and improving overall efficiency by reducing monotonous and physically demanding tasks. However, a seamless integration of such systems into complex human-supervised clinical workflows is challenging. As of yet, guiding principles and specific approaches for solving this problem are lacking.

Methods

We propose to treat ASCAS orchestration as a scheduling problem. However, underlying objectives and constraints for this scheduling problem differ considerably from those found in other domains (e.g., manufacturing, logistics). We analyze the clinical environment to deduce unique needs and conclude that existing scheduling approaches are not sufficient to overcome these challenges.

Results

We present four guiding principles, namely human precedence, command structure, emergency context and immediacy, that govern the integration of self-navigating assistance systems into clinical workflows. Based on these results, we propose our approach, namely Auto-Navigation Task Scheduling for Operating Rooms (ANTS-OR), for solving the ASCAS orchestration problem in a surgical application scenario, employing a score-based scheduling strategy.

Conclusion

The proposed approach is a first step toward addressing the ASCAS orchestration problem for the OR wing. We are currently advancing and validating our concept using a simulation environment and aim at realizing a dynamic end-to-end ASCAS orchestration platform in the future.

中文翻译：

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将自主导航辅助系统集成到诊所：指导原则和ANTS-OR方法。

目的

自主自我导航的临床辅助系统（ASCAS）似乎对改善临床工作流程很有希望。通过减少单调且对身体有要求的任务，可以减轻员工的工作量并提高整体效率。然而，将这样的系统无缝集成到复杂的人类监督的临床工作流程中具有挑战性。到目前为止，还没有解决该问题的指导原则和具体方法。

方法

我们建议将ASCAS编排视为调度问题。但是，此调度问题的基本目标和约束条件与其他领域（例如，制造，物流）存在明显差异。我们分析临床环境以得出独特的需求，并得出结论，现有的调度方法不足以克服这些挑战。

结果

我们提出了四个指导原则，即人为优先，命令结构，紧急情况和即时性，这些原则指导将自助导航系统集成到临床工作流程中。基于这些结果，我们提出我们的做法，即自动-导航任务调度手术室（蚂蚁-OR），用于在外科应用场景解决ASCAS编排的问题，采用基于分数的调度策略。

结论

提出的方法是解决OR机翼ASCAS编排问题的第一步。我们目前正在使用仿真环境推进和验证我们的概念，并旨在将来实现动态的端到端ASCAS编排平台。