Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Laparoscopic surgery, when performed by a well-trained surgeon, is a remarkably effective procedure that minimizes complications associated with large incisions, operative blood loss and post-operative pain, and speeds up recovery time. Unfortunately, from a surgeon's perspective, laparoscopic surgery is more challenging than conventional surgery because of the restricted vision, hand-eye coordination problems, limited working space and lack of tactile sensation. These issues also make laparoscopic surgery a more difficult skill for medical students to master. In general, surgical performance is usually evaluated by experienced surgeons who determine if a resident has acquired sufficient experience to be autonomous. This task is made more complex in minimally invasive surgery as the gestures are carried out inside the patient body. There is no widely accepted method to objectively evaluate surgical skill. The need for such a method is particularly evident in minimally invasive surgery, where specific training methods have not been fully established and little is known about surgeons' skill acquisition process. Our approach to create an objective surgical evaluation technique is based on the assumption that technical skill will reveal itself in the motions, forces, and torques as measured by sensors. Our goal is to develop a system that collect detailed data of the surgeon gesture which will then be compare to action of know experts to provide a closeness metric.