Development of virtual reality surgical simulator with online database

Abstract

Conventionally, assessment of surgical skill in medical trainees is based on direct observation of outcomes by expert surgeons. This method is too subjective and is prone to inter and intra-rater's variability. Therefore, a computer and sensor-based assessment is proposed to standardize the evaluation. Using appropriate sensors can measure and record some hand motion parameters that cannot be detected by the human eyes, yet are essential for skill evaluation. Hence, a virtual reality surgical skill assessment system was developed to complement the conventional assessment method. The software assessment modules were developed on Visual Studio C++ and integrated with a Phantom Omni haptic device with an encoder resolution of 0.055mm for recording hand movements. The subject will perform simple virtual reality tasks that examine their basic psychomotor movements. The sensor recordings of their hand movements will be saved onto the Microsoft Azure Structural Query Language (SQL) database. A website was created to display the data of each individual trainee and this data can be accessed by an expert surgeon for review.