2006 Volume 11 Issue 4 Pages 527-536
To become a surgeon, theoretical knowledge has to be combined with practice through extensive experience in variations of the text-book case. A number of simulators have been developed for surgical training over the past decade. This paper describes an approach based on recorded surgical simulation and its playback as Annotated Simulation Records (ASR). Process for making and using ASRs in training consists of recording and editing of recorded manipulation, annotation of success factors of the manipulation and finally replaying the ASR with visualized success factors. The ASR-based approach promotes surgical education by reducing constraints of time, space and number of people involved, as well as by offering the possibility of flexible learning strategies and integrated assessment of surgical skills. The ASRs are demonstrated in the case of force exertion, which is a fundamental part of surgical manipulation and nowadays modelled in simulators with haptic feedback. Visualization of force exertion can present future, present and past states of the example interaction, and present and past states of the user's interaction.
