“O.R. GOES GREEN”: a first step toward reducing our carbon footprint in the operating room and hospital

Hospitals in Europe produce approximately 6 million tons of medical waste annually, about one-third of this originating in operating rooms. Most of it is solid waste, which can be recycled if bodily fluids do not contaminate it. Only 2–3% of hospital waste must be disposed of as infectious waste, and this is much lower than the 50–70% of...

Music·Wave: Companion Product for Orthopedic Surgery Patients with AI -Generated Music

Orthopedic surgeries are identified as one of the most noisy surgeries inside the OR (operation room). The highest noise sound level could reach up to around 130 dB, which is harmful to patients’ well-being and are likely to evoke negative feelings during surgery. In the previous study investigating the emotional experience of patients who...

The development of a decision-support tool for the performance optimisation of the operating room: Creating a holistic view of the operating room performance for the healthcare professionals by defining the objectives and assessment criteria of optimisation on the performance of the operating room.

The operating rooms (OR) in hospitals is a complex system, with a high number of innovations every year. Therefore the healthcare professionals (HCPs) are required to choose between the several aspects and innovations for the OR. Decision-making requires a mutual vision (Littlejohn et al., 2017) and should be based on evidence (Turner et al.,...

Capital and operational expenditures of different operating room air-handling installations with conventional or ultra-clean air supply systems

When making a decision on the operating room air handling installation and type of air supply system, it is relevant to know the expenditures of the different air handling installations and air supply systems. The aim of this study was to determine the capital and operational expenditures of air handling installations equipped with an ultra...

Object detection using SIFT

Surgical teams use instrument counts to prevent leaving unintended objects in patients. This is done manually, but could potentially be done through computer vision software. This paper presents a proof of concept for detecting instruments in the operating room with the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). The SIFT algorithm is explored and...

The attitude of anesthesia assistants towards Artificial Intelligence-assisted patient monitoring in the Operating Room: Using the knowledge on their attitude and motivation to create an educational module that supports anesthesia assistants in their awareness and understanding of the impact of AI-assisted monitoring

Research on the possibilities to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Operating Room (OR) is rising, although there is no implementation yet. AI-assisted monitoring could provide support to anesthesia assistants in their task of patient monitoring, by making predictions on the future occurrence of deviating events in the vital parameter...

Operating Room Scheduling during COVID-19: An advice on planning models in the Reinier de Graaf hospital

During the first COVID-19 wave in the Netherlands, hospitals had to scale down their elective care all over the hospital to make room for COVID-19 patients. Even the Operating Room (OR) reduced their surgeries to acute care. It is, however, hard to define how much the OR should downscale. Also, there are no national plans on how hospitals should...

Reducing the Environmental Impact of Sterilization Packaging for Surgical Instruments in the Operating Room: A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Disposable versus Reusable Systems

The widespread use of single-use polypropylene packaging for sterilization of surgical instruments (blue wrap) results in enormous environmental pollution and plastic waste, estimated at 115 million kilograms on a yearly basis in the United States alone. Rigid sterilization containers (RSCs) are a well-known alternative in terms of quality...

Operating room ventilation systems: recovery degree, cleanliness recovery rate and air change effectiveness in an ultra-clean area

Background: Entrainment test methods are described in most European standards and guidelines to determine the protected area for ultra-clean ventilation (UCV) systems. New UCV systems, such as temperature-controlled airflow (TcAF) and controlled dilution ventilation (cDV) systems, claim the whole operating room (OR) to be ultra-clean. However,...

Surgical team’ sustainable employability in minimally invasive surgery: To achieve a balanced employability to counteract waste of talent and skills in a sustainable way

Technological developments in the medical world introduce a shift in responsibilities of the surgical team members which might result in waste of talent and skills. The latter might result in disengagement and decreased productivity and thus in illness-related absenteeism. The people pillar of sustainability aims to create a healthy workplace...

Radiation Emission and Protection Regarding the Mobile C-arm in Operating Rooms of the Reinier de Graaf Hospital

The goal of this study was to investigate whether mobile C-arms are being optimally used, securing the safety of staff members in operating rooms of the Reinier de Graaf hospital (RDGG). Mobile C-arm use is evaluated in terms of radiation emission and radiation exposure, staff communication and procedural aspects. The current use of the mobile C...

Radio Frequency Identification in the Operating Room: A systematic approach to test the feasibility of RFID in the operating room for surgical phase recognition

Hospitals are facing enormous financial pressure over the last years. To achieve lower costs, hospitals should invest in smart ways of working to make optimal use of the scarce capacities. A solution can be digitising processes in the hospital to prevent it from making more costs. In line with this founding, planning and scheduling of the...

Healthcare Sustainability Mode and Effect Analysis: Design, validation, and clinical application of the HSMEA tool to improve the environmental sustainability of healthcare

Sustainability is becoming more important in numerous industries, including healthcare. Action to achieve sustainability is undertaken by various means, such as the Green Deal Healthcare. Several tools exist that can assess the environmental impact of a certain industry or company, but no tools exist that aid in actively lowering this...

Instrument Tracking in the Operating Room: Optimization of RFID tag performance

In hospitals, the duration of surgical procedures vary even when the same procedure is performed.<br/>Surgical end-time of the procedure is currently predicted using historical data about similar procedures,<br/>the procedure time and sometimes an indication of the operating surgeon is also taken into account.<br/>After the start of the...

Ergonomic assessment of neck posture in the minimally invasive surgery suite during laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background With the expanding implementation of minimally invasive surgery, the operating team is confronted with challenges in the field of ergonomics. Visual feedback is derived from a monitor placed outside the operating field. This crossover trial was conducted to evaluate and compare neck posture in relation to monitor position in a...

Analysis of verbal communication during teaching in the operating room and the potentials for surgical training