Minimally invasive surgery benefits patients, who receive
smaller incisions and recover more quickly. However, it imposes
new challenges on surgeons, who must develop new perceptual and
motor skills to operate indirectly through an electronic interface.
The operative field is presented as an image on a video display
monitor that is degraded by optics, digital processing, and decreased
resolution. Tactile senstation is lost, and kinesthetic feedback
is diminshed by the length and dampening inherent in laparoscopic
instruments. Although less prominent, auditory and olfactory
sensory input is minimal. Telepresence surgery completely removes
the surgeon from the operative field, by using remote video imaging
and robotics technologies to create an electronic linkage to
a distant site.
In studies using a telepresence surgery system developed at
SRI International, operative procedures were performed successfully,
but with a 2.5-3.0X increase in times required. The objective
of our research is to define the human factors necessary for
complex task performance, and develop methods to quantitate the
visual and haptic requirements for an electronic telesurgery
interface. We have developed an automated Fitts Law task board
as the first step toward defining perceptual and motor skills
in surgery, and are applying this method to determine optimal
system requirements.