Dehlela Shabir, a PhD student at the CSE, Prof. Khaled Shaban, and Dr. Nikhil Navkar from Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) have been awarded the first place in the student essay competition – PhD session, for their paper titled “Deep Learning-Based Gesture Recognition for Enhanced Laparoscopic Suturing Skill Evaluation and Training” at the 9th International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics (ICMHI 2025), held in Kyoto, Japan, from May 16-18, 2025.

ICMHI is an international platform for scientists, engineers, and technologists to showcase innovations in medical and health informatics, with topics ranging from biomedical data mining and medical image processing to cloud computing and personalized treatment. The paper is part of an ARG-awarded project, developed in collaboration with the Department of Surgery at HMC. The project focuses on improving skill acquisition in laparoscopic surgeries through automated gesture recognition using deep learning.

The team is working on several tasks aimed at advancing automation in surgical education and practice, including robotic minimally invasive surgery, mixed reality training, and the emerging concept of a surgical metaverse.