SIM-IBN: Surgical Event Time Imputation in Intent-Based Networking for Internet of Medical Things

The rapid development of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enables automatic recording of surgical reports via interconnected medical devices. However, the reliability of these data is often compromised by missing data, frequently stemming from intermittent IoT communication issues like network disruptions or device malfunctions. This incomplete data critically hinders downstream medical applications and violates implicit network intents related to data integrity and timeliness within an Intent-based Networking (IBN), essential for supporting proactive resource allocation in operating rooms and optimized surgical scheduling. While existing studies focus on addressing missing event types, event time imputation remains a significant, underexplored challenge due to the need to capture implicit temporal contexts and complex cross surgical procedures dependencies. To tackle this for IoMT, we propose a novel Surgical event time IMputation in Intent-Based Networking(SIM-IBN) model. SIM-IBN employs continuous-time LSTMs with attention mechanisms to learn intra-and inter-sequence correlations, effectively recovering missing timestamps. By enhancing data reliability at the source, SIM-IBN serves as a crucial component enabling IBN systems to better fulfill intents for dependable IoMT operations. Rigorous evaluation on real-world surgical event datasets demonstrates SIM-IBN’s superiority over state-of-the-art baselines by up to 11.88% across various missing data scenarios, validating its potential to enable more reliable IoMT systems and enhance operational efficiency in smart healthcare environments.