A Planning-Based Approach to Generating Tutorial Dialog for Teaching Surgical Decision Making

Teaching surgical decision making aims at enabling students to choose the most appropriate action relative to the patient's situation and surgical objectives. This requires a deep understanding of causes and effects related to the surgical domain as well as being aware of key properties of the current situation. To develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for teaching situated decision making in the domain of dental surgery, in this paper, we present a planning-based representation framework. This framework is capable of representing surgical procedural knowledge with respect to situation awareness and algorithms that utilize the representation to generate rich tutorial dialog. The design of the tutorial dialogs is based on an observational study of surgeons teaching in the operating room. An initial evaluation shows that generated interventions are as good as and sometimes better than those of experienced human instructors.