Development of the suture/ligature training system WKS-2 designed to provide more detailed information of the task performance

Authors have proposed as a long-term goal, since 2004, the development of a patient robot which could serve for both training purposes as well as an evaluation tool of medical procedures. As a first approach, we have developed last year a suture and ligature training system named Waseda Kyotokagaku Suture No. 1 (WKS-1), which is composed by a commercial skin dummy with arrays of embedded sensors designed to acquire quantitative data of the task. The WKS-1 was designed to reproduce realistically the task conditions as well as providing objective assessment of the task performance. In particular, the proposed evaluation function considered the following performance indexes: time, displacement and force levels. By performing experiments with medical doctors and unskilled persons, we confirmed the effectiveness of WKS-1 to provide objective assessments of the task performance. However, the functionalities of WKS-1 were too restricted as few automatic procedures were implemented for the acquisition and processing of the collected data. Therefore; in this paper, we are presenting the Waseda Kyotokagaku Suture No. 2 (WKS-2). The WKS-2 has been designed to provide more detailed information of the task performance as well as improving its portability, connectivity, and usability. In addition, thanks to the design improvements on the WKS-2, we have proposed additional evaluation parameters to measure the quality of the suture (after the task has been completed). For this purpose, we proposed a image processing algorithm to automatically measure the width of sutures, the distance among them and the wound area. Preliminary experiments were carried out to verify its effectiveness.