Determination of Effective Training Methods to Learn a Laparoscopic Camera Navigation Task Under Stressful Environments

Stress in surgical environment is generally very high and can result in performance degradation increasing patient risk .Current Training systems for learning minimally invasive surgical skills do not consider the component of stress in their training model. In this study the focus was on developing alternative training models that would allow the learner to effectively perform minimally invasive skill under stress. Two alternate training methods: 1) Training under stress until high performance levels and 2) training until high performance and low cognitive load are achieved were considered for this study. The control group consisted of training under no stress and until high performance levels are achieved. Stressful environments for this study were simulated using physiologic stressors. The effectiveness of the training was evaluated by a comparative analysis of the different performance measures across the groups. We determined that training until automation as the most effective method to perform effectively under stress.