Minimally invasive surgery has become more and more important in modern hospitals. In this context, increasingly more surgeons need to be trained to master the necessary laparoscopic surgical skills. The Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) training tool box has now been adopted by the Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) as an official training tool. While useful, there are major drawbacks of such physical tool boxes including the need to constantly replace training materials, inability to perform objective quantification of skill and the inability to easily adapt to training surgeons on surgical robots such as the da Vinci^® which provides high resolution stereo visualization.

To overcome the limitations of the FLS training tool box, we have developed a Virtual Basic Laparoscopic Skill Trainer (VBLaST™) system, which will allow trainees to acquire basic laparoscopic skill training through the bimanual performance of four tasks including peg transfer, pattern cutting, ligating loop and suturing. A high update rate of about 1 kHz is necessary to ensure continuous haptic interactions and smooth transitions.

The outcome of this work is the development of an integrated visio-haptic workstation environment including two Phantom^® Omni™ force feedback devices and a 3D display interface from Planar Systems, Inc whereby trainees can practice on virtual versions of the FLS tasks in 2D as well as in 3D, thereby allowing them to practice both for traditional laparoscopic surgery as well as that using the da Vinci^® system. Realistic graphical rendering and high fidelity haptic interactions are achieved through several innovations in modeling complex interactions of tissues and deformable objects.

Surgical skill training is a long and tedious process of acquiring fine motor skills. Even when complex and realistic surgical trainers with realistic organ geometries and tissue properties, which are currently being developed by academic researchers as well as the industry, mature to the stage of being routinely used in surgical training, basic skill trainers such as VBLaST™ will not lose their relevance. It is expected that residents would start on trainers such as VBLaST™ and after reaching a certain level of competence would progress to the more complex trainers for training on specific surgical procedures. In this regard, the development of the VBLaST™ is highly significant and timely.