Dual-View Displays for Minimally Invasive Surgery: Does the Addition of a 3-D Global View Decrease Mental Workload?

Abstract

Technological innovations are at the forefront of advances in minimally invasive surgery. Reduced visual and haptic cues, along with frame-of-reference problems with location and scale can cause surgeons to become disoriented. While most laparoscopic surgeries are performed via the use of a limited, singlescope, two-dimensional (2-D) view presented on a monitor in the operating room, there is demand for the availability of three-dimensional (3-D), global views. We compared workload, task-completion time, and the ability to recreate spatial mental representations between study participants who used the current scope-view display and those who used a dual-view display that included both the scope view and a computationally generated global view. We found no statistically reliable improvements for the dual-view display over the single-view display for any of our criterion measures, although trends were toward a dual-view advantage for workload in all tasks and accuracy in the reconstruction task, despite participants' claims that they did not utilize the global view during the experiment. Future research is needed to better understand the information available on global views that can enhance performance during surgical tasks and participants' decisions regarding when to use different views to support their performance.

Do Operators Take Advantage of A Secondary, Global-Perspective Display when Performing a Simulated Laparoscopic Search Task?

“…A 2 (display type) x 2 (number of targets) repeated-measures ANOVA analyzed the effect of display type and number of targets on NASA-TLX responses. Consistent with previous analyses (Sublette, et al, 2010), a main effect of target number was found, where workload increased with target number (F(1,20)=29.0, p<.001, partial η 2 = .60). A two-tailed, paired-samples t-test also found a reliable difference of less workload as subjectively experienced by participants when global view was available (t(20)=-3.75, p=.001), but only in the six-target condition (see Figure 5).…”

“…Twenty-one graduate students (12 females, 9 males) were paid to participate in the experiment. These data include previously unanalyzed measures originally obtained from thirteen participants (Sublette, et al, 2010), as well as data from eight additional participants.…”

“…The order of exposure to display formats was counterbalanced across participants (Sublette, et al, 2010).…”

“…The software offered two views, the traditional 2-D egocentric view (scope view) or the traditional view supplemented by a computationally generated global 3-D panorama of the surrounding tissue (global view) as shown in Figure 1 (Yang, et al, in press). In the first 6 practice trials, a face model was presented; in the remaining 8 trials, the liver model (below) was shown (Sublette, et al, 2010).…”

“…A computationally generated three-dimensional (3-D), global view, derived from pre-operative imaging may, in the future as technologies become more advanced (Yang et al, in press), help reduce disorientations caused by FOR mismatch or eliminate them altogether (Sublette et al, 2010;Yang, et al, in press). The 3-D, global view would be placed alongside the real-time camera view.…”