Understanding Skill Improvements by Practicing the Usage of Surgical Instruments

Abstract

Today, surgical education environments have serious problems. Nowadays, a large part of surgical skills are learned in the operating room while operating on patients. As technology developed, surgical field has been supported by a video image, by using camera named as endoscope and thin surgical devices instead of fingers. In order to make operations more cost effective, operation time should be reduced. Hence, there is a need to improve surgery performance in an efficient way. Efficiency is related to time, cost as well as the ethical issues. Ethical perspective is vital to limit surgery complications and maximize patient safety should be considered. Minimum education should be done on patient. Hence, several virtual educational environments have been developed to address these problems of surgical education. In this study, a surgical simulation game for practicing the usage of surgical instruments is developed as a part of Endoneurosurgery Education Project (ECE). In the game scenarios, a surgical instrument (cautery) is introduced to the participants and tasks are assigned in order to practice the usage of that equipment. The participants are asked to perform the tasks in virtual environment with their dominant and non-dominant hand. Ten equal tasks are prepared in the simulated environment to better understand the task performance of the participants by considering the number of repetition, the task duration and distance taken by the instrument to perform each task. The experimental results of this study give insight about the ideal training period, and number of repetitions needed to accurately use the instrument for surgical education. According to these results in this study some guidelines are developed for the instructional system designers to improve the support level of simulation-based education systems on the current educational programs.