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Skill acquisition and gaze behavior during laparoscopic surgical simulation

View ORCID ProfileSicong Liu, Rachel Donaldson, Ashwin Subramaniam, Hannah Palmer, Cosette Champion, Morgan L. Cox, L. Gregory Appelbaum
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.17.206763
Sicong Liu
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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  • For correspondence: sicong.liu833@duke.edu
Rachel Donaldson
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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Ashwin Subramaniam
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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Hannah Palmer
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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Cosette Champion
bDepartment of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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Morgan L. Cox
bDepartment of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
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L. Gregory Appelbaum
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC
cCenter for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham NC
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Abstract

Background Experts consistently exhibit more efficient gaze behaviors than non-experts during motor tasks. In surgery, experts have been shown to gaze more at surgical targets than surgical tools during simple simulations and when watching surgical recordings, suggesting a proactive control strategy with greater use of feedforward visual sampling. To investigate such expert gaze behaviors in a more dynamic and complex laparoscopic surgery simulation, the current study measured and compared gaze patterns between surgeons and novices who practiced extensively with laparoscopic simulation.

Methods Three surgeons were assessed in a testing visit and five novices were trained and assessed (at pre-, mid-, and post-training points) in a 5-visit protocol on the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery peg transfer task. The task was adjusted to have a fixed action sequence to allow recordings of dwell durations based on pre-defined areas of interest (AOIs). Novices’ individualized learning curves were analyzed using an inverse function model, and group-level differences were tested using analysis of variance on both behavioral performance and dwell duration measures.

Results Trained novices were shown to reach more than 98% (M = 98.62%, SD = 1.06%) of their behavioral learning plateaus, leading to equivalent behavioral performance to that of surgeons. Despite this equivalence in behavioral performance, surgeons continued to show significantly shorter dwell durations at visual targets of current actions and longer dwell durations at future steps in the action sequence than trained novices (ps ≤ .03, Cohen’s ds > 2).

Conclusion This study demonstrates that, whereas novices can train to match surgeons on behavioral performance, their gaze pattern is still less efficient than that of surgeons, suggesting that eye-tracking metrics might be more sensitive than behavioral performance in detecting surgical expertise. Such insight can be applied to develop training protocols so non-experts can internalize experts’ “gaze templates” to accelerate learning.

Article Summary Gaze pattern differences persist between laparoscopic surgery experts and novices who have been trained to reach over 98% of individualized behavioral learning plateaus in the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) peg transfer task.

The importance of this finding lies in motivating the decision and method of including gaze behaviors via eyetracking technology in the present surgical training programs.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Funding: This research was funded by grant support to L.G.A. through the United States Army Research Office [W911NF-15-1-0390].

  • Conflict of interest: All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest related to the research presented in this manuscript.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted July 17, 2020.
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Skill acquisition and gaze behavior during laparoscopic surgical simulation
Sicong Liu, Rachel Donaldson, Ashwin Subramaniam, Hannah Palmer, Cosette Champion, Morgan L. Cox, L. Gregory Appelbaum
bioRxiv 2020.07.17.206763; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.17.206763
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Skill acquisition and gaze behavior during laparoscopic surgical simulation
Sicong Liu, Rachel Donaldson, Ashwin Subramaniam, Hannah Palmer, Cosette Champion, Morgan L. Cox, L. Gregory Appelbaum
bioRxiv 2020.07.17.206763; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.17.206763

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