VIDEO - Measuring stress to better prepare surgeons for the operating room

University of Houston (UH) computer scientists are working with medical researchers at the Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation and Education (MITIE) to improve existing training processes for surgeons. At the core of their effort is understanding the role of stress during surgical training tasks. Ioannis Pavlidis, director of the Computational Physiology Laboratory at UH, and Dr. Barbara Bass, chair of the department of surgery at The Methodist Hospital, developed a new method of measuring stress using thermal imaging of the face. With this method, they were able to identify how anxiety affected performance during training.