Development and validation of a composite scoring system for robot-assisted surgical training—the Robotic Skills Assessment Score

BackgroundA standardized scoring system does not exist in virtual reality-based assessment metrics to describe safe and crucial surgical skills in robot-assisted surgery. This study aims to develop an assessment score along with its construct validation.Materials and methodsAll subjects performed key tasks on previously validated Fundamental Skills of Robotic Surgery curriculum, which were recorded, and metrics were stored. After an expert consensus for the purpose of content validation (Delphi), critical safety determining procedural steps were identified from the Fundamental Skills of Robotic Surgery curriculum and a hierarchical task decomposition of multiple parameters using a variety of metrics was used to develop Robotic Skills Assessment Score (RSA-Score). Robotic Skills Assessment mainly focuses on safety in operative field, critical error, economy, bimanual dexterity, and time. Following, the RSA-Score was further evaluated for construct validation and feasibility. Spearman correlation tests performed between tasks using the RSA-Scores indicate no cross correlation. Wilcoxon rank sum tests were performed between the two groups.ResultsThe proposed RSA-Score was evaluated on non-robotic surgeons (n = 15) and on expert-robotic surgeons (n = 12). The expert group demonstrated significantly better performance on all four tasks in comparison to the novice group. Validation of the RSA-Score in this study was carried out on the Robotic Surgical Simulator.ConclusionThe RSA-Score is a valid scoring system that could be incorporated in any virtual reality-based surgical simulator to achieve standardized assessment of fundamental surgical tents during robot-assisted surgery.