Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 4, 2025
Simulator Training for Endovascular Neurosurgery
Published on: May 6, 2020
Associating Surgeon Feedback With Material Physical Properties in the Development Process of a Resective Epilepsy
Grace M Thiong'o1,2,3,4, Haley Mayer4, Thomas Looi4
1Division of Neurosurgery, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
Background:
Hands-on neurosurgical simulations, specifically techniques involving white matter disconnection, are underdeveloped owing to the paucity of low indentation materials that can adequately mimic brain dissection.
Objective:
To describe the discovery phase of developing a resective epilepsy surgery simulator by quantifying the physical properties of 6 materials and correlating the scores with surgeon feedback data.
Methods:
Six materials, silicone, TissueMatrix, gel support, Synaptive hydrogel, dry SUP706, and moist SUP706 of equal dimension, were evaluated for hardness by measuring their resistance to indentation. Temporal lobe prototypes, 1 for each material, were dissected by 2 neurosurgeons and ordinal ranking assigned. Two null hypotheses were tested: one is that no differences in the indentation properties of the 6 materials analyzed would be elicited and the other is that there would be no correlation between indentation and surgeon feedback scores. Statistical comparison of the means of the different materials was performed using one-way analysis of variance. Surgeon feedback data and indentation score associations were analyzed using the Kendall rank correlation coefficient.
Results:
A statistically significant effect (P value <.0001; α 0.05) was measured. Gel support and Synaptive hydrogel had the lowest indentation scores and similar physical properties. Moist support material scored lower than dry support (P = .0067). A strong positive correlation (Kendall tau = 0.9333, P < .0001) was ascertained between the surgeon feedback ranking and indentation scores.
Conclusion:
Reasonable material options for developing a resective epilepsy surgery are proposed and ranked in this article. Early involvement of surgeons is useful in the discovery phase of simulator invention.
