Thomas S. Lendvay

Yousi A. Oquendo, Zonghe Chua, Margaret M. Coad et al.

Surgical procedures require a high level of technical skill to ensure efficiency and patient safety. Due to the direct effect of surgeon skill on patient outcomes, the development of cost-effective and realistic training methods is imperative to accelerate skill acquisition. Teleoperated robotic devices allow for intuitive ergonomic control, but the learning curve for these systems remains steep. Recent studies in motor learning have shown that visual or physical exaggeration of errors helps trainees to learn to perform tasks faster and more accurately. In this study, we extended the work from two previous studies to investigate the performance of subjects in different force field training conditions, including convergent (assistive), divergent (resistive), and no force field (null).

Yarden Sharon, Anthony M. Jarc, Thomas S. Lendvay et al.

Surgeons' technical skill directly impacts patient outcomes. To date, the angular motion of the instruments has been largely overlooked in objective skill evaluation. To fill this gap, we have developed metrics for surgical skill evaluation that are based on the orientation of surgical instruments. We tested our new metrics on two datasets with different conditions: (1) a dataset of experienced robotic surgeons and nonmedical users performing needle-driving on a dry lab model, and (2) a small dataset of suturing movements performed by surgeons training on a porcine model. We evaluated the performance of our new metrics (angular displacement and the rate of orientation change) alongside the performances of classical metrics (task time and path length). We calculated each metric on different segments of the movement. Our results highlighted the importance of segmentation rather than calculating the metrics on the entire movement. Our new metric, the rate of orientation change, showed statistically significant differences between experienced surgeons and nonmedical users / novice surgeons, which were consistent with the classical task time metric. The rate of orientation change captures technical aspects that are taught during surgeons' training, and together with classical metrics can lead to a more comprehensive discrimination of skills.