AUTHOR=Menekse Dalveren Gonca Gokce , Cagiltay Nergiz Ercil 

TITLE=Distinguishing Intermediate and Novice Surgeons by Eye Movements

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.542752

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.542752

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Surgical skill-level assessment is key to collecting the required feedback and adapting the educational programs accordingly. Currently, these assessments for the minimal invasive surgery programs are primarily based on subjective methods and there is no consensus on the skill level classifications. Among these classifications, a detailed one group them as either beginner, novice, intermediate, sub-expert or expert. Yet, despite the existence of very encouraging results in the literature, most of the studies are conducted to better understand the differences between novice and expert surgical skill levels, though leaving out other crucial skill levels in between. For this reason, to properly integrate skill assessment into minimal invasive surgical education programs and provide skill-based training alternatives one has to classify the skill levels as detailed as possible and identify the differences among all skill levels in an objective manner. To this end, the present study attempts to distinguish novice- and intermediate-level surgical residents based on their eye movements. The eye-movement data was recorded from 23 volunteer surgical residents while they were performing four computer-based simulated surgical tasks under different hand conditions. The data was analyzed using logistic regression to estimate the skill levels of both groups. The best results of the estimation revealing 91.3% recognition rate of predicting novice and intermediate surgical residents on one scenario among four of them under dominant hand condition. These results show that the eye-movements can be potentially used to identify intermediate and novice surgeons. However, the results also indicate that the order in which the scenarios are provided, design of the scenario and the tasks and their appropriateness with the skill levels of the participants are all critical factors to be considered for improving the estimation ratio and, hence, require thorough assessment for future research.