SDSC’s June Data Science Roundtable with Dr. Sem F. Hardon,general surgery resident and surgical data science expert at Amsterdam UMC, shared insights from over a decade of research focused on metric-based performance assessment for minimally invasive surgery. Affiliated with Amsterdam Skills Centre for Health Sciences and Delft University of Technology, Dr. Hardon works to integrate clinical practice with engineering to revolutionize simulation-based surgical education.
His work has helped pioneer the Lapron box trainer,a hands-on laparoscopic simulator that uses motion and force sensors to deliver real-time feedback. He emphasized a shift from traditional OR-based training to simulation-driven, proficiency-based learning to enhance efficiency and patient safety. Since 2021, these new assessment tools have helped to train over 400 residents, with advanced metrics like tissue interaction forces and motion data to effectively evaluate skill progression and identify individual learning patterns and plateaus.
Dr. Hardon also delved into the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in automating feedback and predicting surgical proficiency. While still in the early stages of implementation, AI has shown promise in object segmentation for intraoperative guidance and clinical decision making, and has the potential to provide real-time, multimodal feedback that enhances individual surgical learning curves and reduces intraoperative errors.
Concluding with a call for international collaboration and high-quality datasets, Dr. Hardon is striving to bridge the gap between simulation performance and intraoperative success, and ultimately re-shape surgical education and patient care.
.png)
