By Jill Clendening
Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Irving Zamora, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatric Surgery, and Aimal Khan, MD, assistant professor of Surgery, have received a grant to support the development and validation of an objective robotic skills assessment tool for surgical trainees.
Zamora and Khan will work with Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering Gautam Biswas, professor of computer science; and Jie Ying Wu, assistant professor of computer science, collaborators from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, to develop a novel metric called the Clutch Proficiency Index (CPI) to objectively measure the skill level of surgical trainees.
The two-year grant from the Association for Surgical Education (ASE) is a Center for Excellence in Surgical Education, Research and Training Giant Robot Award.
Current robotic skills assessment measures for surgical trainees are both cumbersome and require another surgeon to evaluate them, which introduces a level of subjectivity.
Engaging the clutch when using a robot allows a surgeon to efficiently toggle between instrument tips and can also temporarily disconnect an instrument from the surgical console to allow the surgeon to safely reposition their hands without affecting the instruments in the operative field.
A pilot study using a robot training platform will collect various metrics of 10 surgical residents and 10 faculty surgeons as they perform a bowel anastomosis (rejoining of bowel segments). The data will be compared to the results of surgeons who are experts in robot-assisted surgeries (more than 50 robot-assisted cases as the primary surgeon).