Knowledge elicitation for performance assessment in a computerized surgical training system

Effective training is the key to minimizing the dangers of minimally invasive surgery (MIS). At present, the assessment of laparoscopic skills relies on the expertise of senior surgeons. The judgment is typically based on and expressed in ordinal variables that can take values such as low, medium, high or other comparable terms. This limited assessment, along with the lack of expert surgeons’ metacognitive awareness of how the judgment process takes place, results in imprecise rules for the evaluation of laparoscopic surgical skills. In this work, we present the knowledge elicitation process to model the