Telementoring in education of laparoscopic surgeons: An emerging technology

Abstract

Laparoscopy, minimally invasive and minimal access surgery with more surgeons performing these advanced procedures. We highlight in the review several key emerging technologies such as the telementoring and virtual reality simulators, that provide a solid ground for delivering surgical education to rural area and allow young surgeons a safety net and confidence while operating on a newly learned technique. Core tip: Telemedicine is becoming used more and more in today's surgical practice. We highlight a new low cost telementoring prototype we developed that allows the delivery of better surgical education and delivering specialized expertise to rural areas. Telemedicine is a global term for a computer technology that allows medical information exchange from one location to another via telecommunication. Telemedicine helps in eliminating the distance barriers and provides medical expertise to rural communities.

Video transparency: a powerful tool for patient safety and quality improvement

“…New technology has presented more ways for videos to be used for real-time feedback and telementoring. The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons has already partnered with technology groups to coach, mentor and review surgical technical skills by video 9. Performance around non-technical (behavioural) skills can similarly benefit from video feedback.…”

Mastering minimally invasive esophagectomy requires a mentor; experience of a personal mentorship

“…However, in the initial phase and for the first contact a visit to the teaching center will remain an essential part of the process. After some procedures in the proctored hospital, telementoring may be further considered [14].…”

Virtual annotations of the surgical field through an augmented reality transparent display

“…Treter et al [26] also used video-conferencing for telementoring, this time using a multi-institutional effort focused on adrenalectomy procedures. Limitations of these approaches involve inherent issues with traditional static telestrator-based approaches: as the mentor surgeon only draws static annotations, drawn lines do not remain rigidly anchored to the surgical field after movement, deformation, or structural change in the surgical field [6].…”

“…The mentor system receives the current frame via a wireless network (4), the frame is displayed (5), and it is provided as an input to the Annotation Authoring module (6). Annotation authoring (Figs.…”