title: The negative effect of distraction on performance of robot-assisted surgical skills in medical students and residents.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Modern surgical practice often requires multitasking in operating rooms, generally full of distractions. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of distraction on robot-assisted surgical skill performance in medical students and residents.
  
  
  METHODS
  Fourteen subjects performed a suture-tying task with the da Vinci(™) surgical system with distractive secondary tasks simultaneously. The time to task completion, speed and the total distance travelled were analysed. Two-way repeated-measures ANOVA were applied. The scores of secondary tasks were analysed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A significant secondary task effect was found with an increase of the time to task completion (p = 0.003) and decreased average speed (p < 0.001). The performance of secondary task for residents was significantly better than students.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The performance of a robot-assisted surgical task was negatively affected by secondary tasks. However, residents with more surgical experience demonstrated a larger attention capacity for multitasking. Therefore, understanding how medical trainees respond to the distractive secondary tasks while performing robot-assisted surgical task is important in developing a surgical training programme based on the concept of attention.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental, Agricultural and Occupational Health, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68198-5110, USA.
authors.forename: Irene H
authors.initials: IH
authors.lastname: Suh
authors.forename: Jung-Hung
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Chien
authors.forename: Mukul
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mukherjee
authors.forename: Shi-Hyun
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Dmitry
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Oleynikov
authors.forename: Ka-Chun
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Siu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002983:Clinical Competence; D013502:General Surgery / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*; D013337:Students, Medical; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult