Serious Game for Laparoscopic Suturing Training

Serious games usually refer to games that are used for training, advertising, simulation, or education and that provide a high fidelity simulation of particular environments and situations. Serious games are starting to be also employed in surgery-based training applications. This paper presents a serious game for training on suturing in laparoscopic surgery. In particular, it is focused on the physical modeling of the virtual environment and on the definition of a set of parameters used to assess the level of skills developed by the trainees. A pair of haptic devices has been utilized in order to simulate the manipulation of the surgical instruments.