Systems and technologies for objective evaluation of technical skills in laparoscopic surgery

Minimally invasive surgery is a highly demanding surgical approach regarding technical requirements for the surgeon, who must be trained in order to perform a safe surgical intervention. Traditional surgical education in minimally invasive surgery is commonly based on subjective criteria to quantify and evaluate surgical abilities, which could be potentially unsafe for the patient. Authors, surgeons and associations are increasingly demanding the development of more objective assessment tools that can accredit surgeons as technically competent. This paper describes the state of the art in objective assessment methods of surgical skills. It gives an overview on assessment systems based on structured checklists and rating scales, surgical simulators, and instrument motion analysis. As a future work, an objective and automatic assessment method of surgical skills should be standardized as a means towards proficiency-based curricula for training in laparoscopic surgery and its certification

InfoSyll: A Syllabary Providing Statistical Information on Phonological and Orthographic Syllables

here is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of the French language aiming at answering new constraints when designing experiments on the syllable issue. The InfoSyll syllabary provides exhaustive characteristics and statistical information for each phonological syllable (e.g. /fi/) and for its corresponding orthographic syllables (e.g. fi, phi, phy, fee, fix, fis). Variables such as the type and token positional frequencies, the number and frequencies of the correspondences between orthographic and phonological syllables are provided. As discussed, such computations should allow precise controls, manipulations and quantitative descriptions of syllabic variables in the field of psycholinguistic research.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Les apprentis lecteurs perçoivent-ils les syllabes à l'écrit ?

International audienceThe goal of this study was to test if apprentice readers (6-7 to 7-8 years old) and beginner readers (8-9 to 10-11 years old) perceive syllabic units in written words. The paradigm of illusory conjunctions was used because it can determine the infra-lexical units identified at the first steps of the written stimuli process. Two experiments were conducted on children from the first (6-7 years old) to the last years (10-11 years old) of the learning-to-read process. Results have shown that children perceive syllables in letter sequences as soon as the end of the first year of the learning-to-read process. The perception of these units is the result of two information sources: the syllabic phonology and the orthographic redundancy. The syllable could then be a pertinent unit in the learning-to-read process

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

International audienceWe investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The results failed to show a pure syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 2a and b, syllabic neighbourhood and bigram frequency were factorially manipulated. The interaction showed that the syllabic neighbourhood effect was inhibitory when bigram frequency was high, whereas it was facilitatory when bigram frequency was low. Similar patterns of results were found in both the yes/no (Experiments 1a and 2a) and go/no-go LDTs (Experiments 1b and 2b), so varying task requirements of the lexical decision did not influence the effect. These findings are discussed in the context of parallel distributed processing and interactive-activation models, and suggest that orthographic redundancy properties contribute to the influence of phonological syllable