Application of self organizing Kohonen map to detection of surgeon motions during endoscopic surgery

Segmentation of the surgeon’s hand movements during the surgery into more primitive parts and recognition of those parts using Kohonen map is discussed in present paper. Main advantages of the proposed approach are that it allows to take into account dynamical characteristics of the hand movements and exclude probability of human error in building etalon segmentation. Ability to recognize current action of the surgeon has a crucial importance in developing a robot able to assist surgeon during the endoscopic surgical operation. One of the possible ways is to predefine a set of possible surgeon’s actions and provide a recognition algorithm explored in the framework of present contribution.