Laparoscopic Trainer

Development of psychomotor skills for the surgeon both in the handling of Gaspers and the depth perception is of vital importance in minimally invasive surgical procedures. Currently the progress of technology has enabled the creation of electronic trainers to facilitate the teaching of laparoscopic surgery with the limitation of high costs and difficult access. This document will demonstrate how to construct a laparoscopic trainer prototype and how to evaluate its performance from tests undertaken with graduate students of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Cuenca. This prototype will be later deployed as a model for practice surgery. The device in question is a mannequin of upper body that has several perforations uniformly distributed for the introduction of Gaspers and has a digital camera inside for display. We have developed four exercises which develop the fundamental skills that a surgeon should have. The results obtained in the tests showed a considerable decrease in time for completing exercises on the prototype. Yield curves were obtained showing an improvement over the traditional method of teaching laparoscopic surgery.