Influence of 3D laparoscopic surgery on surgeon’s visual pattern and mental workload

Abstract

Previous studies have found that surgeons perform better in three-dimensional (3D) surgery than in two-dimensional (2D) surgery. However, no comparative studies have revealed the impact of 3D laparoscopic surgery on the surgeon’s vision. To explore the effect of laparoscopic surgeons’ depth perception during 3D laparoscopic surgery, 10 participants were recruited and performed 4 sets comparative simulated laparoscopic procedures in a virtual simulator, and eye movement signals were acquired, which were used to characteristics the visual differences. Fixation rate and saccade speed were used to characterise the influence of moderating variables for visual characteristics. The results from the data showed significant differences in eye movement behaviour. Compared with 2D laparoscopic surgery, surgeons have more average fixation rate (p-values = 0.001, 0.000, 0.003 and 0.015, respectively) and faster saccade speed (p-values = 0.037, 0.003, 0.073 and 0.105, respectively) in 3D laparoscopic surgery. The results of this study showed that surgeons had more efficient visual search in 3D laparoscopic surgery. At the same time, the results also indicated that surgeon’s mental workload in 3D laparoscopic surgery was low. The relevant conclusions of this paper revealed the advantages of 3D laparoscopic surgery through visual efficiency.

Keywords:

• Laparoscopic surgery
• visual pattern
• mental workload
• evaluation
• 2D/3D

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the staff at the Union Hospital of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, who were supported by the Key R & D and Promotion Projects of Henan Province (No. 192102310457 & 182102310752), (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No. 19C10481026) and Project of Nanyang Development Strategic Research Institute (Project No. nyzl201816).

Author contributions

J.Y.Z. contributed to the conception and design of the study, and wrote the main manuscript text. B.P.W. and Z.H.S. reviewed the experiments and analysed the data. J.Y.Z. and J.L. participated in the acquisition of data and statistical analysis. F.L. and J.L. reviewed the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no competing financial interests. No funding bodies played any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of this manuscript.

Data availability statement

The datasets during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.