Interactive cardiovascular and thoracic surgery
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Interact Cardiovasc Thorac Surg · Oct 2015
A new possibility in thoracoscopic virtual reality simulation training: development and testing of a novel virtual reality simulator for video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery lobectomy.
The aims of this study were to develop virtual reality simulation software for video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) lobectomy, to explore the opinions of thoracic surgeons concerning the VATS lobectomy simulator and to test the validity of the simulator metrics. ⋯ This is the first study to describe a commercially available virtual reality simulator for a VATS lobectomy. More than 100 thoracic surgeons found the simulator realistic, and hence it showed good content validity. However, none of the built-in simulator metrics could significantly distinguish between novice, intermediate experienced and experienced surgeons, and further development of the simulator software is necessary to develop valid metrics.