Background: While several metrics have been employed to characterize different phases of surgical movements in laparoscopy, the extremely small movements and sizes involved in neurosurgery (working field is usually 280-370 [mm2] x h5-10[cm], target size 0.2-1.5[mm]) have prevented until now the development of similar methodologies and systems. Therefore, based on the extremely reduced weight and size of WB-3 IMU, it could be mounted on the bipolar forceps of neurosurgery, and to be used during normal tasks without disturbing surgeon's performance. As a preliminary experimental setup in Fig. 1, we applied WB-3 IMU to a bipolar forceps (Fig. 2), the most commonly used instrument in neurosurgery, and we used the skill evaluation system (Fig. 3) to analyze the movements of neurosurgeons in a simple pick and place scenario.

Objective: Our aim is to develop evaluation tools and methodology that allow the characterization of the neurosurgeon's movements during surgery, and to evaluate the improvement of the performance over training.

Results: The preliminary results proved that several parameters extracted from the IMU’s data (and in particular the PSD and the CDF of both acceleration and angular speed) allow a clear distinction between a professional neurosurgeon and a group of novices; moreover, these data also could show which non-medical subject performs similarly to the surgeon, and how, thus validating the approach proposed in this pilot study.

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