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PURPOSE: Acoustic information can contain viable information in medicine and specifically in surgery. While laparoscopy depends mainly on visual information, our goal is to develop the means to capture and process acoustic information during laparoscopic surgery. METHODS: To achieve this, we iteratively developed three prototypes that will overcome the abdominal wall as a sound barrier and can be used with standard trocars. We evaluated them in terms of clinical applicability and sound transmission quality. Furthermore, the applicability of each prototype for sound classification based on machine learning was evaluated. RESULTS: Our developed prototypes for recording airborne sound from the intraperitoneal cavity represent a promising solution suitable for real-world clinical usage All three prototypes fulfill our set requirements in terms of clinical applicability (i.e., air-tightness, invasiveness, sterility) and show promising results regarding their acoustic characteristics and the associated results on ML-based sound classification. CONCLUSION: In summary, our prototypes for capturing acoustic information during laparoscopic surgeries integrate seamlessly with existing procedures and have the potential to augment the surgeon's perception. This advancement could change how surgeons interact with and understand the surgical field.
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PURPOSE: Even though workflow analysis in the operating room has come a long way, current systems are still limited to research. In the quest for a robust, universal setup, hardly any attention has been given to the dimension of audio despite its numerous advantages, such as low costs, location, and sight independence, or little required processing power. METHODOLOGY: We present an approach for audio-based event detection that solely relies on two microphones capturing the sound in the operating room. Therefore, a new data set was created with over 63 h of audio recorded and annotated at the University Hospital rechts der Isar. Sound files were labeled, preprocessed, augmented, and subsequently converted to log-mel-spectrograms that served as a visual input for an event classification using pretrained convolutional neural networks. RESULTS: Comparing multiple architectures, we were able to show that even lightweight models, such as MobileNet, can already provide promising results. Data augmentation additionally improved the classification of 11 defined classes, including inter alia different types of coagulation, operating table movements as well as an idle class. With the newly created audio data set, an overall accuracy of 90%, a precision of 91% and a F1-score of 91% were achieved, demonstrating the feasibility of an audio-based event recognition in the operating room. CONCLUSION: With this first proof of concept, we demonstrated that audio events can serve as a meaningful source of information that goes beyond spoken language and can easily be integrated into future workflow recognition pipelines using computational inexpensive architectures.
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Acenes, polyaromatic hydrocarbons composed of linearly fused benzene rings have received immense attention due to their performance as semiconductors in organic optoelectronic applications. Their appealing physicochemical properties, such as extended delocalization, high charge carrier mobilities, narrow HOMO-LOMO gaps and partially radical character in the ground state make them very attractive targets for many potential applications. However, the intrinsic synthetic challenges of unsubstituted members such as high reactivity and poor solubility are still limiting factors for their wider exploitation. Herein, we report a simple general synthesis of a new family of angularly fused acenoacenes with improved stability compared to their isoelectronic linear counterparts. The synthesis and comprehensive characterization of pentacenopentacene, pentacenohexacene and hexacenohexacene, with lengths between decacene and dodecacene, are disclosed.