Associating Surgeon Feedback With Material Physical Properties in the Development Process of a Resective Epilepsy Surgery Simulator.

BACKGROUND

Hands-on neurosurgical simulations, specifically techniques involving white matter disconnection, are underdeveloped owing to the paucity of low indentation materials that can adequately mimic brain dissection.

OBJECTIVE

To describe the discovery phase of developing a resective epilepsy surgery simulator by quantifying the physical properties of 6 materials and correlating the scores with surgeon feedback data.

METHODS

Six materials, silicone, TissueMatrix, gel support, Synaptive hydrogel, dry SUP706, and moist SUP706 of equal dimension, were evaluated for hardness by measuring their resistance to indentation. Temporal lobe prototypes, 1 for each material, were dissected by 2 neurosurgeons and ordinal ranking assigned. Two null hypotheses were tested: one is that no differences in the indentation properties of the 6 materials analyzed would be elicited and the other is that there would be no correlation between indentation and surgeon feedback scores. Statistical comparison of the means of the different materials was performed using one-way analysis of variance. Surgeon feedback data and indentation score associations were analyzed using the Kendall rank correlation coefficient.

RESULTS

A statistically significant effect (P value <.0001; α 0.05) was measured. Gel support and Synaptive hydrogel had the lowest indentation scores and similar physical properties. Moist support material scored lower than dry support (P = .0067). A strong positive correlation (Kendall tau = 0.9333, P < .0001) was ascertained between the surgeon feedback ranking and indentation scores.

CONCLUSION

Reasonable material options for developing a resective epilepsy surgery are proposed and ranked in this article. Early involvement of surgeons is useful in the discovery phase of simulator invention.