Objective psychomotor skills assessment of experienced, junior, and novicelaparoscopists with virtual reality

Objective assessment of psychomotor skills in surgery is now a priority; ho wever, this assessment is difficult to achieve because of measurement diffi culties associated with the reliability and validity of assessing surgical skills in vivo and in the laboratory. In this study virtual reality (VR) wa s used to overcome these problems in the objective psychomotor assessment o f senior, junior, and novice laparoscopists. Twelve experienced laparoscopi c surgeons (performed > 50 Minimal Access Surgery (MAS) procedures), 12 ine xperienced laparoscopic surgeons (< 10 MAS procedures), and 12 laparoscopic novices (no MAS procedures) participated in the study. Each subject comple ted all six tasks of the Minimally Invasive Surgical Trainer; Virtual Reali ty (MIST VR). In comparison to the other groups, experienced laparoscopic s urgeons performed the tasks significantly (p < 0.01) faster, had a lower er ror rate, were more economic in their movement of surgical instruments and in the use of diathermy. As a group they also showed greater consistency in their performance. MIST VR distinguished between the three groups of lapar oscopists. VR provides a useful objective assessment tool for evaluating ps ychomotor skills for laparoscopic surgery.