Clinical Trial of Information Acquisition System for Surgical Instruments in Digital Operation Room

To prevent incidents in which surgical items are retained in a patient’s body, a unique device system (UDS) of surgical instruments in the operation room is required. In our previous study, we developed surgical instruments with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and a UDS antenna to assign unique identification to each instrument in operation room. The purposes of the present study were to evaluate the recognition accuracy of the antenna system during surgery and determine the usage rate of preoperatively prepared surgical instruments. The experiments were conducted in four inguinal hernia surgeries. The recognition accuracy of data acquisition was 97.7%. The one cause that decreased this rate by 2.3% was occasional placement of the RFID tags outside the radio communication range of the antenna. However, when the surgical instruments were moved by a nurse and returned to the antenna, the system could detect all instruments. The system could detect RFID tags during surgery, and the accuracy was maintained when the scrub nurses placed the instruments on the antenna unconsciously. The total usage rate of the preoperatively prepared surgical instruments was 50.0%. Thus, half of the surgical instruments were not used during surgery and underwent a repeated sterilization and washing process. These instruments are exposed to high pressure and temperature, increasing the risk of instrument defects. The system described herein can clarify these rates and help to optimize the number of surgical instruments that are prepared before surgery.