Efficacy of a Domestic Simulator for Training in Laparoscopic Surgery: Step by Step Validation

1. Background

The mission of a simulation center in medical reality is to improve patient safety and clinical outcomes by integrating medical simulation based teaching methodologies into the educational curriculum for all students, residents, attending physicians, nurses and other ancillary health care staff.

The main goal of the Simulation Center is to improve safety within patient care. Current and future health care professionals “practice on plastic” honing their skills, refining advanced techniques and learning valuable social interactive tools for delivering important news to patients. This translational research becomes vital for creating the gold-standard in patient safety and medical teaching. One of the most interesting expericnce is about a completely original laparoscopic trainer.

Nowadays laparoscopic surgery is considered the gold standard to treat a lot of diseases, but not all surgeons have acquired the skills necessary for laparoscopic procedures, for example such as proficiency in ambidextrous maneuvers with new tools, enhanced hand-eye coordination, depth perception and compensation for the camera angle, the need to repeat the same exercises to improve these laparoscopic skills has made basic laparoscopy amenable to simulator based training. The continually increasing demand of more complex laparoscopic simulators has led to a rise in prices of these tools and has inspired us the creation of a 4d simulator which is a physical low-cost laparoscopic training platform that reproduces the tactile feedback (eLaparo4d) integrated with a software for virtual anatomical realistic scenarios (Unity3D V 4.1). The department of Surgical Sciences (DISC) have created a low-cost model based on existing and brand new software. The simulator allows the team work: two surgeons can work together like in reality and the system allows the use of real operative instruments, all equipped with tactile feedback. But before using this simulator to assess skills and competencies it needs to be seriously and thoroughly validated: among the five validities Recognized (content, face, construct, concurrent and predictive) we has decided to employ the face validity and the construct validity: the first is usually used informally to define the realism of the simulator or whether the simulator represents what it is supposed to represent and the second because mandatory in distinguishing the experts from inexperienced operators based on a performance score. In this paper we are going to describe the platform validation results using these two types of validities: face and construct validity.