Mentor's brain functional connectivity network during robotic assisted surgery mentorship

In many complicated cognitive-motor tasks mentoring is inevitable during the learning process. Although mentors are expert in doing the task, trainee's operation might be new for a mentor. This makes mentoring a very difficult task which demands not only the knowledge and experience of a mentor, but also his/her ability to follow trainee's movements and patiently advise him/her during the operation. We hypothesize that information binding throughout the mentor's brain areas, contributed to the task, changes as the expertise level of the trainee improves from novice to intermediate and expert. This can result in the change of mentor's level of satisfaction. The brain functional connectivity network is extracted by using brain activity of a mentor during mentoring novice and intermediate surgeons, watching expert surgeon operation, and doing Urethrovesical Anasthomosis (UVA) procedure by himself. By using the extracted network, we investigate the role of modularity and neural activity efficiency in mentoring. Brain activity is measured by using a 24-channel ABM Neuro-headset with the frequency of 256 Hz. One mentor operates 26 UVA procedures and three trainees with the expertise level of novice, intermediate, and expert perform 26 UVA procedures under the supervision of mentor. Our results indicate that the modularity of functional connectivity network is higher when mentor performs the task or watches the expert operation comparing mentoring the novice and intermediate surgeons. At the end of each operation, mentor subjectively assesses the quality of operation by giving scores to NASA-TLX indexes. Performance score is used to discuss our results. The extracted significant positive correlation between performance level and modularity (r = 0.38, p - value < 0.005) shows the increase of automaticity and decrease in neural activity cost by improving the performance.