Haptic Guidance and Haptic Error Amplification in a Virtual Surgical Robotic Training Environment

TL;DR

This study investigates how haptic guidance and error amplification in virtual surgical training affect learning, finding that error amplification enhances performance improvement, especially for trainees with higher initial errors, while guidance may hinder early learning.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of guidance versus error amplification in haptic training for robotic surgery, highlighting their differential impacts on learners with varying initial skill levels.

Findings

Error amplification led to greater performance improvements.

Guidance hindered early learning, especially for novices.

High initial error trainees benefited more from both methods.

Abstract

Teleoperated robotic systems have introduced more intuitive control for minimally invasive surgery, but the optimal method for training remains unknown. Recent motor learning studies have demonstrated that exaggeration of errors helps trainees learn to perform tasks with greater speed and accuracy. We hypothesized that training in a force field that pushes the operator away from a desired path would improve their performance on a virtual reality ring-on-wire task. Forty surgical novices trained under a no-force, guidance, or error-amplifying force field over five days. Completion time, translational and rotational path error, and combined error-time were evaluated under no force field on the final day. The groups significantly differed in combined error-time, with the guidance group performing the worst. Error-amplifying field participants showed the most improvement and did not plateau in their performance during training, suggesting that learning was still ongoing. Guidance field participants had the worst performance on the final day, confirming the guidance hypothesis. Participants with high initial path error benefited more from guidance. Participants with high initial combined error-time benefited more from guidance and error-amplifying force field training. Our results suggest that error-amplifying and error-reducing haptic training for robot-assisted telesurgery benefits trainees of different abilities differently.