Automating 2D Suture Placement.

Suture placement is crucial for patient outcomes, and surgeons typically rely on rules of thumb and experience to choose needle entry and exit points for suture placement. In this paper we present SP2DEEF: Suture Planning 2D Equalizing Elliptical Forces, an algorithm that computes entry and exit points to optimize suture forces, improving wound closure and minimizing scarring. SP2DEEF takes as input the wound curve along with scaling information as input, and generates a full, optimized suture plan that can be fine-tuned by the surgeon. Experiments suggest that our suturing algorithm outperforms a naive baseline, and physical phantom experiments suggest that it performs comparably or superior to an expert surgeon.