Effect of time delay on telesurgical performance

In the area of surgical robotics no standard means of performance evaluation has been established. Thousands of surgeons have gone through the SAGES FLS Program, and the psychomotor skill portion of the program is considered the gold standard in laparoscopic skills evaluation. This research describes the use of the FLS block transfer task to evaluate the performance of both surgeons and non-surgeons teleoperating under different time delay conditions on the University of Washington RAVEN Surgical Robot. Time delays of 0 ms, 250 ms, and 500 ms were used and a statistically significant difference in mean block transfer time as well as mean tool tip path length were shown. For this task no significant difference was shown between the surgeon and non-surgeon groups. Clearly surgeon input and feedback is key to surgical robotic system development, but this result implies that non-surgeon subjects can be tested for simple usability evaluations.