Summarizing Surgical Videos: From Live Tagging to Collaborative Editing

Summarizing surgical videos is necessary for communicating surgical practices, yet editing them requires significant time. Currently, surgeons turn to workarounds both to edit video while recording and to delegate tasks during editing. However, existing video tools do not support these practices. We study the use of live tags for collaborative video summarization in a two-part study using Peroscope, a custom-built software prototype. Attending surgeons (N=9) tagged videos while performing surgery, which they then used to summarize the surgery in collaboration with a resident (N=8). We find that (1) surgeons are capable of tagging video despite the cognitive demands of surgery, and (2) anticipating the final content in the summary shapes tagging strategies. Moreover, (3) tags limit the amount of video content that needs to be reviewed, and (4) they can be used as artifacts to coordinate collaborative work. We discuss implications for the design of future video summarization tools.