Psychomotor skills assessment in laparoscopic surgery using augmented reality scenarios

The aim of this paper was to investigate the potential role of augmented reality (AR) in the assessment of psychomotor skills in laparoscopic surgery. A basic AR task was developed using the ARToolkitPlus. The simulation models (virtual spheres) were embedded in a conventional laparoscopic box trainer. An ARToolkitPlus marker was attached to a laparoscopic instrument for extracting its trajectory. Two different groups were recruited to perform the task: novices and experts. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) were used to evaluate the surgical maneuvers. The results show the strength of the proposed approach for proficiency assessment based on the quality of surgical maneuvers performed in the AR environment.