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Establishing a simulation center for surgical skills

Keywords Costs Imaging Virtual reality Instruments Training coursesWe read with interest the article by Haluck et al. [1] whichreported on how to establish a simulator center for surgicalskills. The authors emphasized the importance of devel-oping curricula that include virtual simulation. Theyanalyze the costs and reliability of such laboratories.Moreover, they include as a target surgical patients and wedo not really understand why. Then, unfortunately, theauthors do not deal with the natural interface of a mini-mally invasive surgery (MIS) surgeon: the medical orbiomedical engineer. We would like to suggest that med-ical engineers may be a useful target. Medical engineersneed to be involved in simulation centers for surgical skillsas well as in clinical MIS. Their involvement is importantin better understanding the capabilities and ergonomics of agiven surgical device. Medical engineers must be involvedin the enhancement of existing instrumentation, conceptionof new and smarter devices, discussion of risk assessment,and eventually collaboratation in the development of newideas. Finally, in their discussion, Haluck et al. conceive ofthe establishment of a training center with virtual reality(VR) simulators. In our experience [2], VR simulators areexpensive and their contribution to knowledge of newsurgical devices is poor. On the other hand, box trainersallow for a better understanding of ultrasound, radiofre-quency, surgical instrumentation, and so on.We recently decided to test 11 medical engineeringstudents in order to analyze and improve their practical andtheoretical knowledge about MIS instrumentation whileperforming standardized MIS tasks on a pelvic trainer. Thecourses were held at the ‘‘Tor Vergata’’ University ofRome in a laboratory setting. The 11 medical engineeringstudents had no experience in laparoscopy. Trainingincluded 3-h hands-on sessions over a three-month course.During the course the students attended theoretical andpractical courses. The course validity was demonstrated bymeasuring significant improvement in performance withincreasing skill. In conclusion, we showed that dry labexperience for medical engineering students is useful forteaching and improving analysis and management of lap-aroscopic devices, allowing identification of problems withthe aim of developing better devices [3, 4].References