Evaluating a Remote Tele-Mentoring Gameplay Setup for Teaching Laparoscopic Suturing Skills

The work presents an evaluation study to investigate the potency of remote tele-mentoring gameplay for training in minimally invasive surgeries, as compared to training through traditional in-person methods for teaching suturing skills. A remote tele-mentoring prototype is implemented to simulate the gameplay. Augmented surgical instruments (remotely controlled by a mentor) are overlaid onto the surgical video to assist the mentee with visual cues. The study evaluates teaching of the simulated surgical task of laparoscopic intracorporeal suturing among mentor-mentee pairs simulating a multiplayer game. It comprises a teaching stage followed by a testing stage, where error counts and duration during the gameplay are recorded and compared. The teaching stage was conducted in either of two modes, Mode-I (traditional in-person mentoring mode) or Mode-II (remote tele-mentoring gameplay mode). Results show that Mode-II took a higher duration in the teaching stage, but both modes performed equivalently in the testing stage. Thus, the efficacy of training through remote tele-mentoring in a gameplay mode is comparable to that of traditional in-person mentoring.