Benchmarking For Surgery Simulators

An increasing number of robotic surgery simulators can be used for validation study of surgical education curricula, their functionality, and testing of their proficiency. These simulators are equipped with a multilevel curriculum, designed with different levels of difficulty for effectively advancing robotic surgery abilities. The most important factor for obtaining an appropriate surgical simulation is creating quasi-natural geometry of surgical scene and physical characteristics of the used materials. In acquisition of classical endoscopic surgery skills, many of the initial challenges are related to a loss of depth perception, the fulcrum effect, and the use of new, different instruments.Constructing simulators for a completely new type of tool, with variable capacity and controlled geometry, the authors faced a new challenge. The positions created were both research devices of new tools (for engineers) as well as trainers (for surgeons) to discover the optimal use of new functional features of tools for various types of operations.To support the educational process, the virtual operating room for planning the surgery and training station has been prepared. In this article, the authors show the process of producing the surgical training stations and few examples of the latest realized specialized devices. This platform allows a geometric modeling of the body anatomy, but also the modeling of the physical properties of the living tissues.Designed and implemented by the Foundation of Cardiac Surgery Development Biocybernetics Laboratory team, special research station modeling selected surgical scenes were used to study all versions of tools and a fully functional robotic Stiff-Flop surgical system.