Surgical Simulation
Surgical simulation allows students to learn and practice technical
skills in a setting which permits time for reflection and discussion,
without risk to patients, and in a pandemic, limits the risks to
trainees and the broader community. Cadaveric or animal models may offer
highly realistic platforms for training a range of surgical skills, but
costs and facility requirements might limit their use and the
transmission risk has not yet been studied. A range of physical and
virtual reality simulators have been developed to address skills
training in Oto-HNS (Javia & Sardesai, 2017). Physical simulators range
from low complexity task trainers to high fidelity, 3D printed, models
with anatomic and haptic feedback in all fields of surgery and for all
training levels (Bur et al., 2017). Virtual reality (VR) simulation
offers the ability not only to more accurately replicate complex
anatomy, but also to introduce realistic pathology or mimic lifelike
emergency situations. Existing VR environments applicable to head and
neck surgical training include the da Vinci Skills Simulator (Zhang &
Sumer, 2013) (Walliczek-Dworschak et al., 2017), the Endoscopic Sinus
Surgery Simulator (ES3) (Edmond, 2002) (Fried et al., 2010), and a range
of VR temporal bone drilling simulations (Wiet et al., 2002) (Zirkle,
Roberson, Leuwer, & Dubrowski, 2007) (Sewell et al., 2008) (Zhao,
Kennedy, Yukawa, Pyman, & O’Leary, 2011).