Haptic laparoscopic skills trainer with practical user evaluation metrics

Limited sense of touch and vision are some of the difficulties encountered in performing laparoscopic procedures. Haptic simulators can help minimize these difficulties; however, the simulators must be validated prior to actual use. Their effectiveness as a training tool needs to be measured in terms of improvement in surgical skills. LapSkills, a haptic skill-based laparoscopic simulator, that aims to provide a quantitative measure of the surgeon's skill level and to help improve their efficiency and precision, has been developed. Explicitly defined performance metrics for several surgical skills are presented in this paper. These metrics allow performance data to be collected to quantify improvement within the same skill over time. After statistically significant performance data is collected for expert and novice surgeons, these metrics can be used not only to validate LapSkills, but to also generate a performance scale to measure laparoscopic skills.