Evaluation of haptic teaching approaches for laparoscopic surgery training

Laparoscopic surgery, one type of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is a very important surgery technique which requires advanced surgical technique. At present, expert one-on-one teaching mainly supports the training of these advanced surgical techniques. However, time constraints prevent experts spending the amount of time desired for this training. Therefore, we aim to support training using a VR-based laparoscopic surgery simulator equipped with a guidance force display. This increases the amount of training a trainee can avail of while at the same time allow the expert and the trainee to increase the quality of the limited one-to-one time together. The first step of our research is to investigate approaches that displays the guidance force to teach experts hand movements. In this study, we used two guidance force-display approaches: Instrument-guiding approach and Hand-guiding approach. Through evaluative experiments, we found that the Hand-guiding approach is more suitable for skill transfer than the Instrument-guiding approach in particular tasks. The results are described below.