Development of a sensor system towards the acquisition of quantitative information of the training progress of surgical skills

Up to now, there is no widely accepted assessment of surgical skills. Nowadays, an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has been proposed as a modern type of examination often used in medicine to test skills. The assessment of skills is realized by practical exams, in which students are evaluated by experienced examiner using a check list. However, the examiner lacks of information which cannot be obtained through the simple observation of the task. Therefore, at Waseda University, we have proposed the development of a patient robot as an advanced evaluation tool to provide more detailed information of the task. As a first approach of our long-term research target, we have proposed the development of a suture/ligature training system which provides quantitative information of the movement of a dummy skin as well as information of the quality of task. Therefore in this paper, we are presenting the Waseda Kyotokagaku Suture No. 2 Refined II (WKS-2RII). The WKS-2RII has been designed to provide more detailed information of the task performance. Experiments were proposed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation parameters to distinguish the differences among different training methods.