The role of simulation fidelity in laparoscopic surgical training

Abstract

Although there have been significant advances in the development of virtual reality based surgical simulations, there still remain fundamental questions concerning the fidelity required for effective surgical training. A dual station experimental platform was built for the purpose of investigating these fidelity requirements. Analogous laparoscopic surgical tasks were implemented in a virtual and a real station, with the virtual station modeling the real environment to various degrees of fidelity. After measuring subjects' initial performance in the real station, different groups of subjects were trained on the virtual station under a variety of conditions and tested finally at the real station. Experiments involved bimanual pushing and cutting tasks on a nonlinear elastic object. The results showed that force feedback results in a significantly improved training transfer compared to training without force feedback. The training effectiveness of a linear approximation model was comparable to the effectiveness of a more accurate nonlinear model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.