Assessment of Surgical Skills with fNIRS

Key Researchers: Xavier Intes, RPI; Subranu De, RPI; Arun Nemani; Meryem Ayşe Yücel, BU/MGH

Summary: Neurophysiological measures of brain activity during surgical task execution and training protocols is a logical step towards providing robust, objective metrics for surgical skill assessment. In this work, we aimed to develop and validate a neuroimaging platform to objectively and accurately assess surgical skill levels as well as predict surgical skill acquisition within the framework of the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery program, which is a prerequisite for certification in general surgery.

This project focuses on testing fNIRS’s utility as an objective measure of surgical skills within the framework of the fundamentals of a laparoscopic surgery program on surgeons and medical students. Initial results demonstrate that optical-based metrics outperformed FLS in classifying subjects with varying surgical expertise.

Publications: Nemani A, Ahn W, Gee D, et al. Objective Surgical Skill Differentiation for Physical and Virtual Surgical Trainers via Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics. 2016 ;220:256-261

Funding: NIH/NIBIB 2R01EB005807, 5R01EB010037, 1R01EB009362, 1R01EB014305, and R01EB019443