Real-Time Haptic Performance Feedback for Model-Based Surgical Skill Training

The goal of this project is to make endovascular surgical training in virtual reality-based simulators faster, more consistent, and more efficacious by adding online vibrotactile (haptic) performance feedback to the visual feedback that is customarily available. There are three research objectives. The first objective seeks to identify the most appropriate measures of surgical performance to provide as supplemental feedback and to determine the frequency of haptic cueing most appropriate for endovascular surgical navigation tasks.

The second objective seeks to implement the vibrotactile feedback on the ANGIO Mentor endovascular simulator, and then assess learning on endovascular navigation techniques in two groups of trainees. One group will receive real-time performance-based haptic feedback and the other will serve as the control group. The third objective seeks to model the empirical results and to use the models to determine how to refine the training protocols to optimize skill acquisition.

An additional set of human subject experiments will test the optimized feedback scheme. This project will advance the national health, prosperity and welfare making surgical training faster and more consistent, which should improve the success rate of endovascular surgery and improve patient outcomes. The project will also advance the science of skill acquisition more generally by providing data on how surgeons learn.

Outreach and mentoring programs will further broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering.

Previous research has demonstrated that movement smoothness measures computed from surgical tool tip kinematics are strong predictors of surgical expertise. Further, it has been shown that providing real-time haptic feedback based on these metrics can positively influence task completion time and trajectory on a non-surgical task. In this project, the study team will leverage the data collection abilities of a virtual reality surgical simulator platform as a first step towards improving the efficiency and efficacy of surgical training.

The plan is to provide endovascular surgical trainees with supplemental real-time, individualized, performance-based feedback. This feedback, based on measures of tool movement smoothness and motor coordination, will be encoded as vibrotactile cues provided to the trainee via a wearable haptic device as they navigate to simulated anatomical targets within the VR simulator.

Human subject experiments involving surgical residents will examine the complex learning dynamics that underly human skill acquisition within the context of endovascular surgery. Mathematical models of skill acquisition will be fitted to the experimental data to identify principles guiding the adaptation of real-time supplemental feedback with the aim of improving learning outcomes and training efficiency.

The project's findings will advance an understanding of the potential role of supplemental feedback on skill acquisition, which will ultimately advance understanding of relevance to human motor control, endovascular surgery, haptics, dynamical systems modeling, and experimental psychology communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.