An Evaluation of Inanimate and Virtual Reality Training for Psychomotor Skill Development in Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) is gaining widespread adoption in many surgical specialties, despite the lack of a standardized training curriculum. Current training approaches rely heavily on virtual reality simulators, in particular for basic psychomotor and visuomotor skill development. It is not clear, however, whether training in virtual reality is equivalent to inanimate model training. In this manuscript, we seek to compare virtual reality training to inanimate model training, with regard to skill learning and skill transfer. Using a custom-developed needle-driving training task with inanimate and virtual analogs, we investigated the extent to which N=18 participants improved their skill on a given platform post-training, and transferred that skill to the opposite platform. Results indicate that the two approaches are not equivalent, with more salient skill transfer after inanimate training than virtual training. These findings support the claim that training with real physical models is the gold standard, and suggest more inanimate model training be incorporated into training curricula for early psychomotor skill development.