Could an electric nudge help a doctor use a surgical robot?

A person tests out the da Vinci Research Kit Could an electric nudge to the head help your doctor operate a surgical robot? Johns Hopkins study finds stimulating people's brains with gentle electric currents can boost learning. People who received gentle electric currents on the back of their heads learned to maneuver a robotic surgery tool in virtual reality and then in a real setting much more easily than people who didn't receive those nudges, a new study shows. The findings offer the first glimpse of how stimulating a specific part of the brain called the cerebellum could help health care professionals take what they learn in virtual reality to real operating rooms, a much-needed transition in a field that increasingly relies on digital simulation training, said author and Johns Hopkins University roboticist Jeremy D. Brown. "Training in virtual reality is not the same as training in a real setting, and we've shown with previous research that it can be difficult to transfer a skill learned in a simulation into the real world," said Brown, the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. "It's very hard to claim statistical exactness, but we concluded people in the study were able to transfer skills from virtual reality to the real world much more easily when they had this stimulation." The work appears today in Nature Scientific Reports . Participants drove a surgical needle through three small holes, first in a virtual simulation and then in a real scenario using the da Vinci Research Kit, an open-source research robot.