Achieving Interface and Environment Fidelity in the Virtual Basic Laparoscopic Surgical Trainer.

Virtual reality trainers are educational tools with great potential for laparoscopic surgery. They can provide basic skills training in a controlled environment and free of risks for patients. They can also offer objective performance assessment without the need for proctors.

Haptic Communication in Collaborative Virtual Environments.

Objective: To understand the interaction between haptic and verbal communication, we quantified the relative effect of verbal, haptic, and haptic-plus-verbal feedback in a collaborative virtual pointing task.

Background: Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) provide a medium for interaction among remote participants. Better understanding of the role of haptic feedback as a supplement to verbalization can improve the design of CVEs.

Validation of the VBLaST: A Virtual Peg Transfer Task in Gynecologic Surgeons.

Study Objective: To validate the Virtual Basic Laparoscopic Skill Trainer (VBLaST-PT; the peg transfer task) for concurrent validity based on its ability to differentiate between novice, intermediate, and expert groups of gynecologists, and the gynecologists' subjective preference between the physical Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) system and the virtual reality system.

Design: Prospective study (Canadian Task Force II-2).

Setting: Academic medical center.

A systematic review of the effect of distraction on surgeon performance: directions for operating room policy and surgical training.

Background: Distractions during surgical procedures have been linked to medical error and team inefficiency. This systematic review identifies the most common and most significant forms of distraction in order to devise guidelines for mitigating the effects of distractions in the OR.

Methods: In January 2015, a PubMed and Google Scholar search yielded 963 articles, of which 17 (2 %) either directly observed the occurrence of distractions in operating rooms or conducted a laboratory experiment to determine the effect of distraction on surgical performance.

Preliminary evaluation of the pattern cutting and the ligating loop virtual laparoscopic trainers.

Introduction: The Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) trainer is currently the standard for training and evaluating basic laparoscopic skills. However, its manual scoring system is time-consuming and subjective. The Virtual Basic Laparoscopic Skill Trainer (VBLaST©) is the virtual version of the FLS trainer which allows automatic and real time assessment of skill performance, as well as force feedback.