Background: National basic laparoscopic skills curricula have been developed and are being incorporated into training programs. Additional procedural based simulator curricula are needed. Our aim was to compare two laparoscopic ventral hernia simulators.
Methods: Novices (n=7) were enrolled in an IRB approved protocol. They trained to proficiency on the 9 basic laparoscopic tasks of the Lap Mentor virtual reality (VR) simulator and performed at least 6 repetitions on all Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery tasks. They then received instruction on laparoscopic incisional hernia repair and were asked to perform two repetitions on the VR laparoscopic incisional hernia repair module of the Lap Mentor simulator and two on a novel custom made box-trainer (BT) laparoscopic incisional hernia simulator. The metrics generated by the Lap Mentor were used for performance assessment for the VR procedure whereas task time and newly defined objective mesh placement error metrics were used for the box-trainer. Participants completed a questionnaire at the end of the study comparing the laparoscopic incisional hernia procedures on the two simulators and their workload was assessed using the NASA-TLX questionnaire. Results are reported as mean ± sd. P
Session: Poster
Program Number: P186
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