A surgical monitoring tool can objectively and accurately assess physician performance during robot-assisted prostate surgery, according to a study published in The Journal of Urology.
The tool — created by Intuitive Surgical and designed to work with the company's da Vinci Surgical System — tracks the surgeon's movement and documents the operation with an internal video.
To assess the efficacy of the tool, researchers analyzed data compiled on four basic steps of prostate surgery. The team looked at a total of 100 procedures performed by 10 experts and 10 novices. Analysis revealed that experts performed the procedures faster with shorter instrument travel distance and less instrument idle time.
"Robotic surgery has been widely adopted by urologic surgeons, but methods of assessing proficiency vary widely between institutions," said Andrew Hung, MD, assistant professor of clinical urology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "In order to be credentialed by institutions to use the robotic system, surgeons must be evaluated by their peers for a handful of procedures, but the evaluations are not ongoing, and sometimes evaluators don't agree on what constitutes proficiency. … We now have an opportunity to put surgeon proficiency under the microscope and see what role it plays in patient outcomes."
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