VALIDATION OF A VIRTUAL REALITY TRAINER FOR THE AUTOSUTURE ™ ENDOSTITCH™ DEVICE. Lee, C, Kurenov S, Punak S, Cendan J. University of Florida College of Medicine. Objective: The Endostitch ™ device (Covidien, CT) is difficult to learn. In particular, the handle requires the use of a toggle which is unique in this instrument. We have developed a virtual reality trainer for the device that offers the use of the actual instrument handle while creating a visible virtual instrument tip complete with virtual needle and suture on a monitor. This report represents the initial validation experiments for the device. Description: A virtual reality and haptic enhanced interface using the Endostitch ™ device has been developed. The necessary software and hardware modifications were wholly developed or constructed in our laboratory. Residents with clinical experience with the instrument (4 senior residents) and those naïve to the instrument (3 junior residents) were tested in an effort to validate the ability of the instrument to discriminate between these groups. Residents were timed while creating a slip-knot using software based metrics tracking. The order sequence of knots and level of resident were codified. Comparisons were made using two-tailed Student’s t-test and statistical relevance identified at p
Session: Poster
Program Number: P232