Simulation-Based Environments for Surgical Practice

Modeling and simulation environments provide several insights about the real situations such as endoscopic surgery. Endoscopic surgery requires both hand skills, so, understanding the effect of using dominant or non dominant hand on mental workload is important to better design, develop and implement modeling and simulation environments to support real-life implementations of surgical procedures. This experimental study presents a simulation application of eye-tracking approach to understand mental workload in different hand conditions: dominant hand, non-dominant hand and both hand. The results of the study show that, performing simulated surgical tasks by both hands compared to dominant hand, increases mental workload which is evident by higher pupil size. Accordingly, to manage the mental-load problems of surgeons while performing complex tasks that require both hand usage simulation-based environments can be used. Consequently, collection of detailed information such as eye-data, can give several insights about the behaviors of the surgeons. Also, their required skills can be improved by development of simulation and training environments.