Surgeon Training with Haptic Devices for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery: An Experimental Study

Development of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery increasingly demands for efficient training methods. This paper describes an experiment exploring the use of haptic interaction for the purpose of skill training (haptic training). Various experiment tasks that include simple and complex tool paths have been developed for this purpose. 105 acquisition sessions distributed in 7 different tasks from 27 naive subjects and one surgeon performed teleoperated exercises with Omni Phantom. Task’s learning curves with and without robotic assistance and effects of damping have been discussed. For the force guidance case, assistance level gradually decreased the applied force as the training progressed. In the controversial scenario of robotic assistance for motor-learning benefits, this study shows such assistance improve the rate of learning for both simple and complex tasks.