Laparoscopic Surgery Training System (LASTS)

Current minimally invasive surgery and laparoscopic surgery (MIS/LS) training standards encompass only baseline hand-eye coordination and cognitive skills, and do not fully address the surgical skills required to perform particular procedures. To address these issues, the necessary set of surgical skills must be determined, and these skills must be measured objectively. Little is known about the durability of surgical skills, including how skills decay and how to best train and retrain skills to reduce such decay. A skill model and objective measures that reliably assess surgical skill acquisition during training, skill decay when skills are unused, and skill reacquisition during refresher courses can reveal this information. To achieve these objectives, we propose to develop and thoroughly evaluate a Laparoscopic Surgery Training System (LASTS) for learning, refreshing, and assessing LS skills. LASTS uses models of surgical skill acquisition and decay, objective methods of surgical skill assessment, and individual skill and training models to maximize training effectiveness and minimize skill attrition by creating training curricula customized to each surgeon"s abilities. LASTS models are populated with empirical data and validated through a set of experiments with surgeons of many levels of expertise.