UH & MITIE Study: Preparing Surgeons for the Operating Room

To better prepare new surgeons for the operating room, University of Houston (UH) computer scientists are working with medical researchers at the Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation and Education (MITIE) to improve existing training processes. At the core of their effort is understanding the role of stress on a surgeon's path to competency. Ioannis Pavlidis, director of the Computational Physiology Laboratory at UH, Dr. Barbara Bass, chair of the department of surgery at The Methodist Hospital developed a non contact method of measuring stress to identify whether a surgeon is in control of his or her anxiety with the task at hand during training simulations.