Invited talk on surgical simulation

This talk will provide an overview of the steps that should be worked through to define what should be in a VR surgical simulator and then describe how to plan out, build, and assess/refine the simulator.
 
Approaches to teaching the physical, proprioceptively-centric skills of surgery that do not require patients or operating/procedure rooms have been under development for some time. Many in vivo and in vitro animal tissues have been used and in recent years quite a few specialized inanimate models have been developed for anatomic structures. Yet there remain distinct unmet needs such as the need for systemic, physiologic response to surgical action; lack of complex tissue response to diverse technical means of manipulation, dissection, joining, etc.; desire for consistent, readily available, objective measures of performance; and limitations in the diversity of variations in anatomic structure and material response characteristics experienced for the same procedures. To address these issues and many others, computationally-centric simulators (often referred to as virtual reality [VR] surgical simulators) have been developed to provide an alternate means of gaining experience with the tool-tissue interactions at the core of so many surgical skills.
 
Computation-centric surgical simulators emerged to address specific training needs in minimally invasive procedures, especially in laparoscopy, flexible endoscopy, and endovascular. This first generation of simulators is now widely used for specific skills training. Most MIS-centric professional societies now embrace simulation as an integral part of their educational process going forward. However, while comprehensive curricula spanning the breadth of skills that must be learned are available for surgical specialties, integrated simulation-based experiences covering these curricula are not widely available. Instead, the current simulators are often a patchwork of content. As a result, there is a large need to additional simulators in minimally invasive as well as in the unaddressed area of open incision/access surgical procedures.
 
This presentation will provide insight on how to go about creating simulators to meet these need areas. It will survey of the development of simulation-based training systems to date, show how specific opportunities for new simulators can be identified, and describe how these simulators can be constructed and assessed relative to their correctness and effectiveness in teaching physical surgical skills.

What you need to think about if you want to create a VR surgical simulator

Dwight Meglan, PhD, CTO at SimQuest