Homemade laparoscopic surgical simulator: a cost-effective solution to the challenge of acquiring laparoscopic skills?

Abstract

Homemade laparoscopic surgical simulators are easy to construct, affordable, usable and of interest to trainees.

“Take-home” box trainers are an effective alternative to virtual reality simulators

“…Reports in the current literature indicate that access to clinical skills centres may be limited [28][29][30]. Although we have not collected data on the time of day the simulators were used, we speculate that having a box trainer in the convenience of one's home instead of in a clinical skills centre may have contributed to the increased utilization of the box trainers.…”

“…For instance, the VRS used in this trial is commercially available for $60000 to $100000 [31] while the box trainer is commercially available for £420 [32]. Moreover, box trainers are well received by trainees who find them to be useful [30,33].…”

Development and Validation of a Homemade, Low-Cost Laparoscopic Simulator for Resident Surgeons (LABOT)

“…Couto et al accurately described their low-cost laparoscopic box but they did not apply any tests of performance [13]. Other authors have tested their home-made boxes with different modalities: Oti et al performed exercises similar to ours, obtaining similar positive results, but the authors tested their box by enrolling only 20 students without surgical experience [14]. Thinggaard et al recruited surgeons and trainers (60 subjects) to validate their box with different exercises [15].…”

“…In the literature, the most common material used to simulate the abdominal wall and cavity is plastic (Table 1) [14,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. For simulating the abdominal wall, we decided to build LABOT by using plywood and rubber, which are cheap and easy to manipulate.…”

“…Li et al [11] conducted a review of the literature to analyze the differences between commercial and non-commercial laparoscopic simulators and found that although the models of the self-assembly simulators described were simple and affordable options, the main criticisms underscored by the authors were the usual omission of the simulator cost and that a significant part of them had not been routinely subjected to any standardized validation. Since 2014, other studies on laparoscopic boxes have been published, but the critical issues identified by Li et al have not been satisfactorily resolved [2,[12][13][14][15][16][17]. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no studies in the literature include clear instructions on how to make a homemade laparoscopic box.…”