Effects of Haptic Feedback and Stereoscopy on a Surgical Training Task in Virtual Reality

INTRODUCTION Minimally invasive surgical techniques offer patients the promise of smaller incisions, less pain, and shorter recovery times [4]. New technologies have allowed this rise in minimally invasive surgery making efficient and effective training of the surgical task vital to the continued success of this technique. Due to the challenging visual conditions and the unintuitive nature of tool manipulation when performing laparoscopic surgery, tremendous training of these skills is required and is often performed through simulators. In fact, there are more surgical training simulators available for laparoscopic training than any other type of medical training task [10].