It has recently been shown that micropauses during long surgical procedures can be beneficial for surgeons' precision and fatigue. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of micropauses on surgical precision measured by a simple smartphone application.
Material and methods: Two surgeons performed 40 simple laparoscopic procedures (appendectomy and cholecystectomy) with or without micropauses. After the operation the precision of surgical movements was measured by a simple smartphone application in which the number of successful trials and their mean time were used as a precision surrogate.
Results: Mean number of successful trials was significantly higher for appendectomy than for cholecystectomy (5.59 vs 4; p = 0.032). There was a difference between participating surgeons both in terms of number of successful trials (5.80 vs 3.55; p = 0.01) and a mean time of all successful trials (10.03 vs 6.28; p = 0.001). No other statistically significant differences were identified.
Conclusion: Micropauses had no influence on surgical precision as evaluated after short laparoscopy procedures. The only differences were surgeon-dependent and intervention-dependent.