Surgical Technology Integration With Tools For Cognitive Human Factors (STITCH)

The need for accurate training has become even more important with the development of new surgical technologie , many of which have transformed methods of treatment for both the patient and the surgeon. D fficult-to-master technologies such as the components of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) hig~light the need for surgical competence but do not inherently provide a solution for how f o define and measure it. The longterm goal of this research is to build an integrated surgical te hnology environment designed for the continuous monitoring of task performance, with a partic lar focus on the inclusion of important but currently-overlooked cognitive measures .. I Obiective/Hvpothesis: Evaluation of surgical skill in MIS ~an be made more accurate, objective, and general by considering cognitive and environ ~ ental factors such as mental workload, stress, situation awareness, and level of comfort w'th complex tools. This research will show that a comprehensive framework for measuring co nitive human factors in MIS settings will provide an important, statistically significant setiof (largely overlooked, in this domain) non-redundant metrics for evaluating performance ib the context of new technologies, tasks, and learning methodologies. i Study Desie:n: Software development efforts will produce t ~ e general-purpose Plug-and-Play (PnP) framework and application-specific tools usable in tha framework. Well-defined methodology will be incorporated in the development proces to insure required safety, reliability and robustness attributes for the problem domain. The human studies used to adapt, select, and validate the cognitive measures will be divided in ~ o four parts: an equivalence testing phase followed by three validity studies. The equivalence st dy will ensure reliability of test results after minor modifications, The subsequent validity te ts will assess construct validity (the extent to which our measures of stress and workload dissoci te from measures of performance in situations where, theoretically, they should); concurrent vah f ity (sensitivity to differences among surgical conditions known to differ substantially in d'fficulty); and predictive power (degree to which measures can predict more complicated ind' ces of surgical proficiency, including adaptive aspects of performance on which student have not received explicit training), iI Relevance: The STITCH project will develop a specificatiop, design, and implementation of an integrated surgical training and assessment framework and ~iII provide assessment results for specific cognitive measures, including validity and predictiv~ studies. These results will be useful for implementing improvements in training methods t~at seek to use valid cognitive measures as part of the assessment strategy. NO'fHING ON 'fIllS PAGE IS l'ROPRlET+RY INFORMATION i 2