3D Sound Cueing for the Simulation of Arthroscopic Surgery

Arthroscopic surgery offers many advantages compared to traditional surgery. Nevertheless, the required skills to practice this kind of surgery need specific training. Surgery simulators are used to train surgeon apprentices to practice specific gestures. In this paper, we present a study showing the contribution of 3D sound in assisting the triangulation gesture in arthroscopic surgery simulation. This ability refers to the capacity of the subject to manipulate the instruments while having a modified and limited view provided by the video camera of the simulator. Our approach, based on the use of 3D sound metaphors, provides interaction cues to the subjects about the real position of the instrument. The paper reports a performance evaluation study based on the perception of 3D sound integrated in the process of training of surgical task. Despite the fact that 3D sound cueing was not shown useful to all subjects in terms of execution time, the results of the study revealed that the majority of subjects who participated to the experiment confirmed the added value of 3D sound in terms of ease of use.