Background The benefits of haptic feedback in laparoscopic surgery training simulators is a topic of debate in the literature. It is hypothesized that novice surgeons may not benefit from the haptic information, especially during the initial phase of learning a new task. Therefore, providing haptic feedback to novice trainees in the early stage of training may be distracting and detrimental to learning. Objective A controlled experiment was conducted to examine the effect of haptic feedback on the learning curve of a complex laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying task. Method The ProMIS and the MIST-VR surgical simulators were used to represent conditions with and without haptic feedback, respectively. Twenty novice subjects (10 per simulator) were trained to perform suturing and knot-tying and practiced the tasks over eighteen one-hour sessions. Results At the end of the 3-week training period, subjects performed equally fast but more consistently with haptics (ProMIS) than without (MIST-VR). Subjects showed slightly higher learning rate and reached the first plateau of the learning curve earlier with haptic feedback. Conclusion In general, learning with haptic feedback was significantly better than without haptic feedback for a laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying task, but only in the first 5 hours of training. Application Haptic feedback may not be warranted in laparoscopic surgical trainers. The benefits of a shorter time to the first performance plateau and more consistent initial performance should be balanced with the cost of implementing haptic feedback in surgical simulators.

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Haptic feedback has been shown to benefit performance in various laparoscopic surgery tasks. However, providing haptic feedback to novice trainees in the early stages of training may be distracting. A controlled experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of haptic feedback on the learning curve of a complex laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying task. It was hypothesized that subjects would perform better and reach the first plateau in the learning curve earlier with haptics than without. Twenty novices participated in eighteen one-hour training sessions. Results indicated that training with haptics was not significantly different from training without haptics after five hours of practice. However, those who learned with haptic feedback were more consistent in their task performance and had a shorter learning curve. Therefore, haptic feedback may be omitted in a laparoscopic surgical simulator in early training provided that extensive training is possible.

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