Clinical and commercial validation of AI driven automated inventory management for surgery

To operate safely, surgeons need the right instrument at the right time, and under the right controls. Frequently, they don't get it. Current processes for tracking the surgical instruments around the world are highly inadequate and healthcare providers responsible for carrying out surgical procedures face some serious global issues. At a time when global healthcare providers are already encountering severe cutbacks due to difficult economic conditions, there is also an urgent need to improve patient safety as the sector expects a significant increase in surgical requirements from an ageing population. Further, preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US. In the UK, the annual estimated cost of medical error is more than £1bn. Operating rooms (OR) are a common source of financial waste, on average two operating room hours a day are wasted in England, leading to a loss of over £100K per OR per month of opportunity cost.

Having the right inventory is a key factor in improving the efficiency of operating rooms and sterilisation services. Manually ensuring the count and availability of surgical instruments costs the NHS £160 million annually. Further, hospitals significantly underuse the surgical instruments in a tray (15-20% of instruments are used), leading to wastage and negatively impacting carbon footprint.

The current state of the art in tracking surgical inventory is to use RFID systems, which are expensive and only identify an object without localisation.

At Scalpel, we developed cutting edge Computer Vision driven technology that identifies hundreds of surgical instruments without any tags. Our technology provides clear and accurate information of inventory present in a tray and a graphical display of any missing items. Our system counts instruments in seconds, saving in staff resources can be channelled into more productive activities.

Our technology was developed and validated working with multiple NHS Trusts and funded by Innovate UK.

This multidisciplinary project generates further evidence for the successful adoption of the innovative technologies developed by Scalpel.

Whilst we have focused primarily on operating rooms so far, the expected outputs from this project include a more advanced sensor hub and a model that counts instruments across all surgical specialities in a sterilisation unit at various phases in its life cycle. We will then bring the same technology to improve inventory flow in the hospitals.