Medicus- Laparoscopic Sugical Skills Training and Assessment Tool

While on deployment, many surgeons – including those who specialize in obstetric, vascular, cardiac, and orthopedic surgery – spend the bulk of their time performing trauma surgery. Such prolonged lapses in practice can result in the decay of specialized knowledge and skills. This becomes a major problem upon the surgeons’ return stateside, when they are expected to resume their specialty duties with little or no re-credentialing. With this in mind, Aptima proposes to develop the MedicusTM Laparoscopic Surgical Skills Training and Assessment Tool, which applies automated measurement of psychomotor skills to drive deliberate practice-based training for decay-prone skills. When complete, MedicusTM will collect real-time measures of the surgeons’ performance that are measured using the position, orientation, and/or manipulation of the surgical instruments. MedicusTM will then calculate mathematical formulae-based measures of the surgeon’s performance, score the surgeon’s performance by comparing it with those of surgical experts, and provide the surgeon with diagnostic feedback using computer animations with audio commentary. Finally, MedicusTM will be integrated with another tool that trains and assesses critical cognitive skills in laparoscopic surgery. The end result will be an integrated set of training and assessment tools for laparoscopic surgeons in the military and civilian medical communities.