Team 3 - Spring 2021 - Laparoscopic Trainer

We are a team of talented software engineers from Central Michigan University, and this website is for our senior design project

Main Goals and Objectives

Our goal for this project is to improve the training modules for 3D System's Simbionix LAP Mentor. We took on this project for our senior design class to advance the surgical skills of the staff at Covenant Hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, which Central Michigan University has a partnership with.

Requirements

There are two main objectives that the trainer must achieve. First, it must accurately train users to perform dissection between tissue planes. Examples of such procedures include laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal), hernia repair, and colon surgeries. According to Dr. Faiz, training for these dissections takes a long amount of time to learn and is often a skill that is missed during training. By practicing these procedures with the laparoscopic trainer, medical residents will be able to enhance their skills and bring their experience into real-world scenarios.

The second objective the trainer must achieve is training residents to safely navigate around and mobilize organs and structures within the body. Having a good understanding of human anatomy and how to complete this task during a procedure is another critical goal in residents’ training. By meeting these objectives, the laparoscopic trainer could become a key asset in properly preparing users for surgery for improving certain medical procedures.

Contributions

We did not create the LAP Mentor, and simply seek to modify the existing modules to be more realistic and easier to operate.

Currently, the most realistic modules have the same anatomy and same body proportions, which won't always be the case. Since real-world patients will come in all shapes and sizes, it is important to use different body models in the training modules to better help medical residents.

Team

Meet the talented team members and advisors

Darryl Williams

Team member

Senior at Central Michigan University

willi41d@cmich.edu

Dylan White

Team member

Senior at Central Michigan University

white1dt@cmich.edu

Grace Kern

Team member

Senior at Central Michigan University

kern1ge@cmich.edu

Nathanial Kos

Team member

Junior at Central Michigan University

kos1nj@cmich.edu

Dr. Alex Redei

Professor

Professor at Central Michigan University

Dr. Faiz Tuma

Advisor

General surgery

Resources

Here are a list of some external resources we have used to aid us in our project: