Demonstration Paper: A Comparative Study of Surgical Skills Assessment in a Physical Laparoscopy Simulator Using Wireless Inertial Sensors

A novel approach, using wireless inertial sensors (the Orient specks), is presented for the automated assessment of surgical skills in a physical laparoscopic ('keyhole') surgery simulator. Performance metrics are applied to inertial data from subjects categorized by previous laparoscopic experience: novices (less than 2 months); intermediates (less than 2 years) and experts (6 to 10 years of active laparoscopic operating experience). These metrics are shown to distinguish between groups, demonstrating 'construct validity' of the system. The method is evaluated against an optical instrument tracking system and compares favourably, thus demonstrating 'concurrent validity' with an existing method. Our findings suggest that a combination of the proposed metrics can be used to generate a 'technical performance score' for a given laparoscopic simulated task. This has the potential to help guide surgical training and monitoring of surgical performance.