Acquisition of quantitative data for the detailed analysis of the suture/ligature tasks with the WKS-2R

Up to now, there is no scientific methodology for the assessment of surgical skills during the training progress. Nowadays, an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has been proposed as a modern type of examination often used in medicine to test skills such as communication, clinical examination, medical procedures, etc. The assessment of skills is realized by practical exams, in which students are evaluated by experienced examiner using a check list. However, this approach highly depends on the examiner' s criteria. In fact, the examiner lacks of information to objectively evaluate trainees' performance (which cannot be obtained trough the simple observation of the task). For that purpose, we have proposed the development of a suture/ligature training system which provides quantitative information of the movement of an artificial skin as well as information of the quality of the suture. Such information is provided by means of the Waseda-KyotoKagaku Suture No.2 Refined (WKS-2R) which has been developed by the authors. In this paper, the evaluation parameters proposed for the assessment of the suture/ligature task are detailed. Such evaluation parameters were proposed based on the functionalities of the WKS-2R and our studies of the OSCE examination. Preliminary experiments were carried out to analyze the performance of trainees while performing the suture/ligature task with the WKS-2R. From the experimental results, we could collect information from the seven proposed evaluation parameters and analyze their behavior.