Thursday, September 18, 2025
The ITEA project IWISH has received the prestigious ‘ITEA Award of Excellence for Business Impact.’ The project researches how operating rooms and clinical workflows can be used and organized more efficiently.
IWISH applies advanced machine learning, synthetic data generation, and eye-tracking in real-time workflow management. By meticulously mapping out the procedures and activities taking place in an operating room, it creates a better understanding of where efficiency can be improved. IWISH optimizes processes that are currently estimated to cost European hospitals around €9 billion annually.
Operations often do not go as planned. Until now, the dynamics of surgical procedures have been insufficiently captured by operating room planning systems. A surgery that overruns, can delay other operations. If a procedure goes more smoothly than expected, an operating room may remain unnecessarily idle for some time. The ITEA project IWISH has developed smart solutions to address, among other things, this problem.
Video data from the operating room
ITEA is the Eureka Cluster for innovation in software and systems. Within IWISH (Intelligent Workflow Optimisation and Intuitive System Interaction in Healthcare), TU Delft and LUMC, working together in Medical Delta, collaborate with Reinier de Graaf Gasthuis (RDGG) and Philips.
This takes place partly within the scientific program Medical Delta NIMIT. For example, Anneke Schouten, as a Medical Delta PhD candidate, contributed with her doctoral research into the effect of technological innovations on the workflows of medical staff in the operating room.
IWISH collected real-life video data of cardiac catheterisations by interventional cardiologists in the cath lab at Reinier de Graaf Gasthuis and in the operating room at LUMC — with informed consent from all parties involved. Using this data, it trained computer vision algorithms to automatically recognize and predict procedural phases and activities. This helps optimize workflows and planning, reduce workload, and improve both efficiency and safety.
Minimising overbooking and downtime of operating rooms
IWISH developed automated video technologies that can recognize different phases and activities during surgeries, even in procedures that have not been previously observed.
For example, Emanuele Frassini (TU Delft / Reinier de Graaf Gasthuis) focused on automatically determining the end time of a medical procedure based on clinical phases extracted from video recordings of cardiovascular procedures. This predicted end time can be used to assess whether the procedure is progressing according to plan and to adjust the schedule if necessary.
Silvia Pintea (LUMC) developed methods to classify actions and activities without the algorithm having been explicitly trained for them. This approach has the major advantage that the technology can be applied more quickly to new situations and procedures, and thus can be implemented more widely.
A solid foundation for the future of minimally invasive procedures
Thanks to these AI applications that provide scheduling support, hospitals can manage parallel operating rooms more effectively. IWISH demonstrated that the number of procedures completed within the daily schedule can be increased by 36%. This contributes to reducing waiting lists and clinical staff overtime. This progress represents an important step toward smarter, more efficient operating rooms.
The project partners are continuing to develop video-based tracking, situational awareness and decision support. Because medical staff have been closely involved throughout the project, the step toward clinical integration is relatively small. IWISH thus helps healthcare providers reduce costs, optimize patient care and bring intelligent clinical workflows into daily practice.
“Winning this award is a wonderful recognition of the excellent collaboration between the parties involved,” says Prof. Dr. John van den Dobbelsteen (TU Delft, RDGG, LUMC and Erasmus MC), Scientific Leader at the Medical Delta MIMIC program and Medical Delta Professor. “A possible next step is to automate part of the tasks with these models, such as scheduling, equipment control and administration. This could take a lot of work off the shoulders of healthcare professionals.”
This project received funding from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency and Enterprise Singapore.
About ITEA
ITEA is the Eureka Cluster for innovation in software and systems, enabling a large international community to collaborate in funded projects that turn innovative ideas into new businesses, jobs, economic growth and benefits for society. See also https://itea4.org.
