Play Me Back: A Unified Training Platform for Robotic and Laparoscopic Surgery

In this letter, we propose a training approach combining hand-over-hand and trial and error training approaches and we evaluate its effectiveness for both robotic and standard laparoscopic surgical training. The proposed approach makes use of the data of an expert collected while using the da Vinci Surgical System. We present our data collection system and how we use it in the proposed training approach. We conduct two user studies (N = 21 for each) to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. Our results show that subjects trained using this combined approach can better balance the speed and accuracy of their task execution compared with others trained using only one of either hand-over-hand or trial and error training approaches. Moreover, this combined approach leads to the best performance when it comes to the transferability of the acquired skills when testing on another task. We show that the results of the two studies are consistent with an established model in the literature for motor skill learning. Moreover, our results show for the first time the feasibility of using a surgical robot and data collected from it as a training platform for conventional laparoscopic surgery without robotic assistance.