Dual-view displays for minimally invasive surgery: Does the addition of a 3-D global view decrease mental workload?

Technological innovations are at the forefront of advances in minimally invasive surgery. Reduced visual and haptic cues, along with frame-of-reference problems with location and scale can cause surgeons to become disoriented. While most laparoscopic surgeries are performed via the use of a limited, single-scope, two-dimensional (2-D) view presented on a monitor in the operating room, there is demand for the availability of three-dimensional (3-D), global views. We compared workload, task-completion time, and the ability to recreate spatial mental representations between study participants who used the current scope-view display and those who used a dual-view display that included both the scope view and a computationally generated global view. We found no statistically reliable improvements for the dual-view display over the single-view display for any of our criterion measures, although trends were toward a dual-view advantage for workload in all tasks and accuracy in the reconstruction task, despite participants' claims that they did not utilize the global view during the experiment. Future research is needed to better understand the information available on global views that can enhance performance during surgical tasks and participants' decisions regarding when to use different views to support their performance.