As laparoscopic surgery continues to gain widespread popularity in the world of surgery, the lack of one fundamental sensation at times put surgeons in a state of apprehension. Tactile feedback, the missing sensation, is claimed by surgeons to be an essential process to secure accurate knowledge of the region that is being operated on. In cases where visual cues alone fail to allow distinction of tissues of an area, tactile information may be the only remaining alternative the surgeon can rely upon to make a correct judgement. It is therefore imperative that this form of perceptual feedback may also be portrayed to surgeons using laparoscopic surgery, thereby recreating their more familiar environment, and assist them increase the chances of successfully completing a surgical procedure. In an attempt to remedy the present situation where tactile information in laparoscopic surgery is lacking, conditions that are thought to influence the surgeons' tactual perception during surgery were chosen to be investigated. Namely, these conditions are composed of bare hand, gloved, and the use of an intermediate tool. Unfortunately, the exact tactual dimensions that are relevant during surgery in general remain ambiguous and unclear. Therefore, as a preliminary investigation, it was proposed to take the dimension "softness", a dimension that is in general accepted as one of the fundamental tactual perception dimensions, and examine how the aforementioned examination conditions affect tactual perception for a material that differs in "softness" alone. Modified two alternative forced choice tasks were performed as a first experiment through which fruitful and promising outcomes were seen. To build on the finding of this experiment, a second experiment, which involved the softness magnitude estimations of the stimuli set, again under the same examination conditions, was carried out. The standalone results from the two experiments showed some interesting outcomes, primarily that softness was perceived differently under different examination conditions. Upon comparison, however, behaviours and activities which were to some extent, remarkable and perplexing, were encountered, leading to conclusions which in part were contradictory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:555969 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Ozaki, Kenʾichi |
| Publisher | University of Leeds |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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