[IGSTK-Developers] Crash recovery?

[David Gobbi]

I think that I should clarify a bit: a lot of the equipment found in
an OR is remarkably reliable, such as the anesthesia machines
and the bed itself.  For electrical or mechanical devices that
actually go into the patient, such as bipolar tweezers or drills,
I saw the surgeon do a quick equipment check every single
time before touching the patient.

Anything associated with a PC was a different story, though.
The Windows 2000 that is used in the OR is no different from
the Windows 2000 that goes on a home PC.

David Gobbi wrote:

> Hi Tina,
>
> Your OR experience matches mine fairly well.  Surgeons are very
> accustomed to
> dealing with unreliable equipment, and if something goes wrong, they
> always find
> a way to continue.  You could say that the workflow patterns in the OR
> are very
> robust.
>
> Surgical robotics and certain categories of minimally invasive surgery
> need to be
> a little more robust than a typical IGS system, though.  Even more
> importantly
> than robustness is mathematical accuracy, because being a centimetre
> from the
> target is far more damaging than a mere system crash...
>
> - David
>
> P.S.  I had my own software in the OR for my PhD (for data collection
> purposes
> only), and after the first trip I added an auto-save feature so that all
> fiducial
> locations were automatically reloaded after a crash.  It saved me a fair
> bit of time
> in the end.
>
> Tina Kapur wrote:
>
>> Thanks, David, Andy.
>>
>> Like you said, David, systems crashes can be independent of the 
>> robustness
>> of the application software, and for whatever reason (stress 
>> photons?) they
>> happen frequently in the OR.  In my experience with various types of
>> surgeries/IGS systems, while a system crash is considered a
>> fact-of-life-that-leads-to-delay, a system unable to recover its 
>> state is a
>> bad thing.  For example,  typical neurosurgery IGS applications use
>> point-based registration that is performed at the start of the 
>> procedure,
>> before the patient is draped. If this system were to crash well after 
>> the
>> patient has been draped and the sterile field set up, without crash 
>> recovery
>> capability, the surgeon will have to abandon use of the system 
>> completely
>> for the rest of the case because even if they were willing to start 
>> over, at
>> this point in the surgery they can no longer access points/landmarks 
>> on the
>> patient's skin. This will make the surgeon less willing to put in the
>> upfront effort of doing the registration and generally using IGS the 
>> next
>> time.
>>
>> And yes, logging specific information about all steps that are perfomed
>> (data loading, all registrations, image manipulation) would need to be
>> stored, if you were to do this.
>>
>> Finally, if the goal is to have an application use IGSTK as one of it's
>> components, it makes sense to leave crash recovery to the individual
>> application writers.  However, if applications will be written using 
>> IGSTK
>> only, it might be worth planning this in.
>>
>> -Tina
>>
>>  
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: David Gobbi [mailto:dgobbi at atamai.com] Sent: Thursday, 
>>> September 08, 2005 3:39 PM
>>> To: Tina Kapur
>>> Cc: 'IGSTK Developers'
>>> Subject: Re: [IGSTK-Developers] Crash recovery?
>>>
>>> Hi Tina,
>>>
>>> So far we've focused on crash avoidance, but crash recovery is 
>>> definitely a good thing too.  Crashes can't be completely avoided 
>>> (at least not on Windows or Linux, which are the target operating 
>>> systems).
>>>
>>> Right now the way that igstk object do their logging isn't suitable 
>>> for recovery, the loggers are being used to keep track of method 
>>> calls, state changes, etc.
>>>
>>> What we would need is to keep a log of specific information that can 
>>> be used for crash recovery, e.g. which data sets have been loaded, 
>>> what the result of most recent patient registration was, etc.
>>> There are no plans to support this in the current iteration, but 
>>> since the Reader and Registration classes have just been added, it's 
>>> probably worth considering how those classes can log some info that 
>>> can be use for recovery.
>>>
>>> - David
>>>
>>>
>>> Tina Kapur wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Does IGSTK have a mechanism for crash recovery?  I was making a 
>>>> wish list of what such a toolkit should have, and I can see how     
>>>
>>> the logging   
>>>
>>>> mechanism could be used for recovery from a mid surgery     
>>>
>>> crash, but just   
>>>
>>>> wanted to check if the feature was planned for anytime in the     
>>>
>>> near future.
>>>   
>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>> -Tina
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  
>>
>
>
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