Functional Brain States Measure Mentor-Trainee Trust during Robot-Assisted Surgery

Mutual trust is important in surgical teams, especially in robot-assisted surgery (RAS) where interaction with robot-assisted interface increases the complexity of relationships within the surgical team. However, evaluation of trust between surgeons is challenging and generally based on subjective measures. Mentor-Trainee trust was defined as assessment of mentor on trainee’s performance quality and approving trainee’s ability to continue performing the surgery. Here, we proposed a novel method of objectively assessing mentor-trainee trust during RAS based on patterns of brain activity of surgical mentor observing trainees. We monitored the EEG activity of a mentor surgeon while he observed procedures performed by surgical trainees and quantified the mentor’s brain activity using functional and cognitive brain state features. We used methods from machine learning classification to identity key features that distinguish trustworthiness from concerning performances. Results showed that during simple surgical task, functional brain features are sufficient to classify trust. While, during more complex tasks, the addition of cognitive features could provide additional accuracy, but functional brain state features drive classification performance. These results indicate that functional brain network interactions hold information that may help objective trainee specific mentorship and aid in laying the foundation of automation in the human-robot shared control environment during RAS.