Drive

Arthroscopy is a minimally invasive surgical technique where patients are operated through small incisions in one of their joints. The knee, shoulder and ankle are most frequently operated. This technique is highly popular as it has tremendous advantages for the patient in terms of quick recovery and rehabilitation. However, this technique requires demanding surgical skills of the surgeons as eye-hand coordination and haptic feedback are disturbed.

Design philosophy

Our philosophy is to provide optimal training platforms that offer quick learning and minimize patients being at risk during the training process. Firstly, we develop high-fidelity training environments that basically replace the human joint by a dummy and leave the remaining operating scene intact, e.g. PASSPORT knee simulator. Secondly, we gather objective evidence that demonstrates different validity levels of the existing simulators. Thirdly, we develop smart feedback on performance systems to cover the entire range of surgical goal-oriented and safety skills, e.g. ForceTrap.

Focus on specific challenges

Challenges for simulators are the following: objective evidence of skill transfer of simulator training, design of high fidelity but low cost simulators, development of excellent training tasks, design of optimal feedback on performance. Examples of our solutions are found in the pictures and associated scientific papers in the blog roll of this project.

Grants & Awards

• 2012 Marti Keunig Eckhard Foundation Topic: Validation of arthroscopic simulators
• 2010 Valorisation Grant 1 from Technology Foundation STW Topic: PASSPORT: practicing surgical skills in real-life environments
• 2007 Dutch Arthroscopy Society (NVA) Topic: Further development of an arthroscopic knee simulator