Virtual simulation and surgical education: Current challenges and future solutions

The popularity of minimally invasive surgery to decrease mortality, reduce time to recovery and improve patients' quality of life continues to grow. The need to provide sufficient training for medical fellows and surgeons is critical. Time is the major limiting factor for surgical trainees to gain enough practice to master minimally invasive surgical skills. During the last decade, the advancements in simulation have posed a potential solution to provide a safe and cost-effective training environment for surgical trainees to master fundamental surgical skills. In this chapter, we extend the notion of using virtual simulation to be the best alternative for surgical skills education and summarize its key contributions to train future surgeons. Meanwhile, we discuss the challenges of simulation in providing a true-to-life surgical training environment to develop skills readiness, maintenance and retention. More importantly we provide suggestions to select the best performance metric to measure the skills performance and learning in surgical practice.