Enriching surgical process models by BPMN extensions for temporal durations

Many surgical interventions are finding new techniques in robot-assisted surgery, which allows surgeons to perform surgery with the help of robotic arms. A formal representation of robot-assisted surgery can provide surgeons with an overview of the main stages of surgical intervention and a detailed description of the different steps, including all the possible emergencies that may occur. Formalizing such kinds of interventions could also help to train new surgeons. However, literature does not consider formal representations and properties of robot-assisted surgery properly. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard language allowing to represent processes in a graphical and semi-formal way. In this paper, we propose to use BPMN for representing the processes and the guidelines underlying robot-assisted surgery, considering the explicit modeling of temporal and informational aspects: in detail, guidelines aim at providing surgeons with high-level recommendations based on the operational knowledge of expert users, delivering hints on how to execute exploration tasks. As a real-world application domain, we consider here the Robot-Assisted Partial Nephrectomy (RAPN), which is the partial surgical removal of a kidney to treat severe kidney diseases such as cancer.