Development and Evaluation of a Novel Pan-Specialty Virtual Reality Surgical Simulator for Smartphones.

Touch Surgery is a novel simulator that allows cognitive task simulation and rehearsal of surgical procedures. Touch Surgery is designed for Apple and Android smartphones and tablets. This allows a global community of surgical professionals to review the steps of a procedure and test their competence. Content on Touch Surgery is developed with expert surgeons in the field from world leading institutions. Here we describe the development of Touch Surgery, its adoption by the global training community.

Face, content and construct validity of a virtual reality simulator for robotic surgery (SEP Robot).

INTRODUCTION: This study aims to establish face, content and construct validation of the SEP Robot (SimSurgery, Oslo, Norway) in order to determine its value as a training tool. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The tasks used in the validation of this simulator were arrow manipulation and performing a surgeon's knot. Thirty participants (18 novices, 12 experts) completed the procedures. RESULTS: The simulator was able to differentiate between experts and novices in several respects. The novice group required more time to complete the tasks than the expert group, especially suturing. During the surgeon's knot exercise, experts significantly outperformed novices in maximum tightening stretch, instruments dropped, maximum winding stretch and tool collisions in addition to total task time. A trend was found towards the use of less force by the more experienced participants. CONCLUSIONS: The SEP robotic simulator has demonstrated face, content and construct validity as a virtual reality simulator for robotic surgery. With steady increase in adoption of robotic surgery world-wide, this simulator may prove to be a valuable adjunct to clinical mentorship.