Researchers study brain activity of surgeons for signs of cognitive overload
It is a high-stakes scenario for any surgeon: a 65-year-old male patient with a high BMI and a heart condition is undergoing emergency surgery for a perforated appendix.
An internal bleed has been detected, an anaesthetics monitor is malfunctioning and various bleepers are sounding – before an urgent call comes in about an ectopic pregnancy on another ward.
This kind of drama routinely plays out in operating theatres, but in this case trainee surgeon Mary Goble is being put through her paces by a team of researchers at Imperial College London who are studying what goes on inside the brains of surgeons as they perform life-or-death procedures.
Goble looks cool and collected as she laparoscopically excises the silicon appendix, while fending off a barrage of distractions. But her brain activity, monitored through a cap covered in optical probes, may tell a different story.
The researchers, led by Daniel Leff, a senior researcher and consultant breast surgeon at Imperial College healthcare NHS Trust, are working to detect telltale signs of cognitive overload based on brain activity. In future, they say, this could help flag warning signs during surgery.
“The operating theatre can be a very chaotic environment and, as a surgeon, you have to keep your head and stay calm when everyone is losing theirs,” said Leff. “As the cognitive load increases, it has major implications for patient safety. There’s no tool we can use to know that surgeon is coping with the cognitive demands of that environment. What happens when the surgeon is maxed out?”
In the future, Leff envisages a system that could read out brain activity in real-time in the operating theatre and trigger an intervention if a surgeon is at risk of overload.
Source: 2 March 2024