Changes in Electrocardiographic Signals During Training in Laparoscopic Surgery Simulator: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

The aim of this work is attempting to identify physiological characteristics of the learning process in surgery residents. As an exploratory approach, we are interested in determining statistically significant changes in electrocardiographic (ECG) signals recorded while a group of eleven first year general surgery residents were performing three basic skills tasks from the virtual reality (VR) laparoscopic simulator LapSim®. These signals were processed and heart rate (HR) was calculated to analyze it along with the overall score for each exercise. Statistical analysis was performed by means of analysis of variance showing the effects of training session, difficulty of the task and participants gender on heart rate and performance. Our preliminary experimental results show that the score obtained in the tasks improves with training session, being in the women where significant changes occur. HR analysis showed that it increases with the complexity of the task. Besides, the effect of gender on HR showed that in male group there were the significant changes with the difficulty of the task, and a decrease with the training session in the intermediate level of difficulty task.