Background: Recent tele-mentoring technologies for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) augments the operative field with movements of virtual surgical instruments as visual cues. The objective of this work is to assess different user-interfaces that effectively transfer mentor's hand gestures to the movements of virtual surgical instruments.
Methods: A user study was conducted to assess three different user-interface devices (Oculus-Rift, SpaceMouse, Touch Haptic device) under various scenarios. The devices were integrated with a MIS tele-mentoring framework for control of both manual and robotic virtual surgical instruments.
Results: The user study revealed that Oculus Rift is preferred during robotic scenarios, whereas the touch haptic device is more suitable during manual scenarios for tele-mentoring.
Conclusion: A user-interface device in the form of a stylus controlled by fingers for pointing in 3D space is more suitable for manual MIS, whereas a user-interface that can be moved and oriented easily in 3D space by wrist motion is more suitable for robotic MIS.
Keywords: minimally invasive surgery; surgical simulations; tele-mentoring; user-interfaces; virtual surgical instruments.
© 2022 The Authors. The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.