Analysis of Superior and Inferior Parietal Lobe Function duringDepth Perception and Spatial Manipulation in Surgical Robotics

Traditional minimally invasive surgery (MIS) forces the surgeon to perceptually reconstruct the operative scene in 3D from a 2D visual display. Surgeons undertaking MIS are anticipated to recruit the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and superior parietal lobe (SPL) since these are crucial nodes in processing coordinate transformations for the visual control of eye and hand movements (Ferraina,2009) spatial cognition (Sack,2009, Marshall,2001), spatial processing (Husain,2007) and stereopsis (Nishida,2001). Robotic MIS consoles capable of alternating between monoscopic and stereoscopic visual displays offer a unique platform for investigating human depth perception. Here we evaluate the relative importance of the PPC and SPL for 3D (vs 2D), object depth perception and hand-eye co-ordination in a cohort of novice surgeons performing simulated robotic MIS, in order to clarify initial data suggesting that stereoscopy results in greater PC excitation (Paggetti,2010).