OntoFlow, a software tool for surgical workflow recording

Surgical Process Modeling is a growing field of biomedical data science, aiming to create and support context aware surgical systems. As a part of it, novel research intends to provide standardized, formal description of surgical processes. Surgical workflow recordings based on ontologies can provide objective measurements of surgical skill, thus standardizing surgical performance. Comparing the operational phase to the calculated optimal process could allow for new, context aware surgical training, evaluation and assistant systems. In this paper, we present a new software tool, named OntoFlow, developed to record ontology-based surgical workflow during the clinical practice, with post-event editing and reviewing capabilities. OntoFlow directly accesses the background ontology, therefore it can speed up the process of ontology development. As a surgical workflow reviewing software it can also be used as a training tool for surgical residents.