Network analysis of surgical innovation: Measuring value and the virality of diffusion in robotic surgery

George Garas, Isabella Cingolani, Pietro Panzarasa, Ara Darzi, Thanos Athanasiou, Feng Xia
2017 PLoS ONE  
Existing surgical innovation frameworks suffer from a unifying limitation, their qualitative nature. A rigorous approach to measuring surgical innovation is needed that extends beyond detecting simply publication, citation, and patent counts and instead uncovers an implementation-based value from the structure of the entire adoption cascades produced over time by diffusion processes. Based on the principles of evidence-based medicine and existing surgical regulatory frameworks, the surgical
more » ... vation funnel is described. This illustrates the different stages through which innovation in surgery typically progresses. The aim is to propose a novel and quantitative network-based framework that will permit modeling and visualizing innovation diffusion cascades in surgery and measuring virality and value of innovations. Materials and methods Network analysis of constructed citation networks of all articles concerned with robotic surgery (n = 13,240, Scopus ® ) was performed . The virality of each cascade was measured as was innovation value (measured by the innovation index) derived from the evidence-based stage occupied by the corresponding seed article in the surgical innovation funnel. The network-based surgical innovation metrics were also validated against real world big data (National Inpatient Sample-NIS ® ). Results Rankings of surgical innovation across specialties by cascade size and structural virality (structural depth and width) were found to correlate closely with the ranking by innovation value (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient = 0.758 (p = 0.01), 0.782 (p = 0.008), 0.624
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0183332 pmid:28841648 pmcid:PMC5571947 fatcat:md74kepsnvhwzp43ipyufrwoqa