The Effect of Expertise on Gaze Behaviour in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Laparoscopic skills vary with experience and training of surgeons. The complexity of laparoscopic surgeries affects the cognitive resources of surgeons significantly and leads to many biliary injuries during surgeries. Assuming that experts are more focused, we investigated how the skill level of surgeons during live surgery is reflected through eye metrics. Throughout the study, we used five eye movement metrics classified under saccadic, fixations and pupillary metrics. Forty-two laparoscopic surgeries have been conducted with four surgeons belonging to three expertise levels (novice, semi-expert and expert) from which thirty-eight surgeries were considered in the study. With the use of mean, standard deviation and ANOVA test we found three reliable metrics which we can use to differentiate the skill levels during live surgeries.