Despite many technologic leaps, surgical training has stayed more or less unchanged for more than a century. Surgeons in training have always had to gain operative experience through "supervised trial and error" on real patients. This approach makes surgical training completely dependent on the actual case load, prolongs surgical training, and compromises patients' safety. Robotic surgery Training Lab will create a new medium for acquisition of surgical skills through simulation of all operations that can be done via the robot. Surgeons can use surgical robots to practice operations on 3-dimensional, virtual-reality visual simulations and soft-tissue models that recreate the textures of human tissues through force feedback (haptics). Image-guided simulations will allow surgeons to practice procedures on 3-dimensional reconstructions of the anatomy of the actual patients who they plan to operate on the next day.