Nikhil Deshpande, Leonardo S. Mattos, Giacinto Barresi, Andrea Brogni, Giulio Dagnino, Luca Guastini, Giorgio Peretti, Darwin G. Caldwell

Abstract— State-of-the-art laser phonomicrosurgery (LP) used for the treatment of abnormalities in the larynx involves complex otolaryngological surgical techniques. The traditional laser aiming control relies heavily on surgeon dexterity and requires significant psychomotor skills. Scalability, operative distance, and the anatomically small nature of the vocal folds all combine to compound the surgical challenges. In this paper, imaging based feature extraction is presented as a method to establish performance metrics that allow an objective measurement of equipment usability, surgeon performance and learning progress in performing LP. The metrics establish an objective rating scale for surgeon skill assessment and equipment usability. From preliminary experimental analysis, it is seen that the metrics allow to distinguish between levels of surgical performance with the equipment. The combined metric rating scale gives a robust quantitative measure for performance assessment.