Surgical Performance Assessment

Abstract

This article focuses on human skill understanding in the context of surgical assessment and training which has enormous and immediate application potential to enhance healthcare delivery. Surgical procedural performance involves interplay of a highly dynamic system of inter-coupled perceptual, sensory, and cognitive components. Computer-Integrated Surgery systems are a quintessential part of modern surgical workflow owing to developments in miniaturization, sensors and computation. Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery, and the engendered computer-integration, offers unique opportunities for quantitative computer-based surgical-performance evaluation. The skill evaluation metrics as discussed need a variety of sensory data that limits the application to very specific robotic devices. The ability to couple quantitative, validated and stable metrics for surgical performance would lead to improvements in assessment and subsequently, training methods. Cognitive assessment can now be extended to also include sensorimotor assessment, with capacity to monitor and track skill across time.