UW CVES: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND SURGICAL SKILLS


		BIOTECHNOLOGY AND SURGICAL SKILLS TRAINING The Center for Videoendoscopic Surgery is an educational and research facility within the Department of Surgery at the University of Washington. The mission of the CVES is the development and refinement of videoendoscopic surgical and training techniques for the new skills of videoendoscopic, minimally invasive surgery. In partnership with Dr Blake Hannaford in the Biorobotics Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Drs Suzanne Weghorst and Thomas Furness at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory in the Washington Technology Center, and a number of industry sponsors, we have been studying the practice and training of surgical skills in this new field of videoendoscopic surgery. We have developed a training and educational laboratory, just recently completed. Active projects seek to determine how we should operationally define surgical skill and how surgical trainees at all levels gain these skills. We are investigating how videoendoscopic skills differ from more traditional open surgical skills, and how the training and instrument "interface" can be optimally configured to enhance performance and safety. Aptitude, cognitive, affective, and psychomotor aspects of procedural skill all contribute to "skillful performance" and must be addressed as separate educational targets. Physical and virtual simulators are being developed and will be refined as these aspects of skilled performance are more clearly delineated. Anticipated outcomes from this work include the development of objective and reproducible measures of skill, integrated into a structured training program. Skills aptitude, skills training, and skills credentialling are long range goals of the program. Applications for this work include many branches of medicine as well as other areas with tasks requiring application of novel instruments and techniques in a mission-critical fashion, certainly a precise description of the surgeon just beginning laparoscopic surgery. We believe that development of intelligent training tools and an error-correcting interface for minimally invasive surgical instruments will be integral to the safe introduction of even more advanced MIS techniques such as thoracoscopic coronary artery bypass in the future. Presented at the Biotechnology Tour February 12, 1997

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