Does It Exist a Link between Performance and Parietal Cortex Activity in Surgical Tasks?

This pilot study would to explore the ideas of a possible correlation between the goodness of surgical performance in robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) activity. This cortical area is known to be involved in stereoscopic vision (Sakata et al., 1997), visual control of eye movements and hand-eye co-ordination (Shikata et al., 1996). This issue is of great interest because robotic assisted surgery provides the surgeon with a stereoscopic view of the operative field combined with aligned motor-visual axes and mechatronically controlled instruments. In this contribution, we conduct an exploratory experiment aiming at investigating the hypothesis of a correlation between the performance in reached in a surgically relevant task and the activation of PPC channels as revealed by the fNIRS measurements. First results are very promising and suggest the occurrence of a link between performance and channel activation.