Minimally invasive surgical approaches are preferred over more invasive procedures for minimizing pain to the patient, and achieving diagnostic accuracy and rapid patient recovery. Training for these more difficult surgical approaches can be very time consuming and demanding of resources. The need for efficient and effective laparoscopic training has long been recognized, but training has only recently been standardized under the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) program [1]. There are several challenges in laparoscopic surgery that make such training especially important, including difficult visualization and the “fulcrum effect” of tool motion reversal.
A number of virtual reality-based training devices have been developed for traditional laparoscopic surgery [2–3]. However, these devices lack portability, and the relative inflexibility of their hardware makes them ill suited for simulating all configurations of the laparoscopic surgeries. Thus, it is crucial to develop a new generation of training technology that will enable...
