Waseda Bioinstrumentation system WB-3

Laparoscopic Surgery

Background: The research for laparoscopy is focused on assessing the abilities of surgeons by measuring their movements during laparoscopic training. This study is very important to evaluate the effectiveness of laparoscopic training systems; moreover, the objective evaluation results and expert's suggestions allow the development of better training/evaluation systems for young surgeons.

Objective: Our aim is to define a set of parameters that allow us to characterize surgeon's movements during a surgical procedure, in order to see how surgeons of different expertise rank act during the operation in relation to these movement parameters, and to evaluate the improvement of performance after training. These analyses and modeling, in turn, represent a significant step towards the automation and the robotic assistance for surgery.

Laparoscopy training with WB-3
(19sec, 4.57MB, MP4)

Results: The preliminary analysis of the data acquired during the experiments (the mean and standard deviation of acceleration; 95% cumulated distribution of acceleration; the path length of the movements of hands and the execution time completing the knots) clearly shows the novice’s improvements after the training. Moreover, the overall results are in line with the ones obtained with other - more expensive and more cumbersome - systems, thus confirming the validity of the proposed approach.
The results presented in this paper are a clear step towards the development of a training system for an objective evaluation of the surgeon’s performance in particular during MIS. These results could also be extended to develop instruments and methodologies for a functional/ergonomic evaluation of surgical instruments.

References