Assessing Bimanual Performance in Brain Tumor Resection With NeuroTouch, a Virtual Reality Simulator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Validated procedures to objectively measure neurosurgical bimanual psychomotor skills are unavailable. The NeuroTouch simulator provides metrics to determine bimanual performance, but validation is essential before implementation of this platform into neurosurgical training, assessment, and curriculum development. OBJECTIVE: To develop, evaluate, and validate neurosurgical bimanual performance metrics for resection of simulated brain tumors with NeuroTouch. METHODS: Bimanual resection of 8 simulated brain tumors with differing color, stiffness, and border complexity was evaluated. Metrics assessed included blood loss, tumor percentage resected, total simulated normal brain volume removed, total tip path lengths, maximum and sum of forces used by instruments, efficiency index, ultrasonic aspirator path length index, coordination index, and ultrasonic aspirator bimanual forces ratio. Six neurosurgeons and 12 residents (6 senior and 6 junior) were evaluated. RESULTS: Increasing tumor complexity impaired resident bimanual performance significantly more than neurosurgeons. Operating on black vs glioma-colored tumors resulted in significantly higher blood loss and lower tumor percentage, whereas altering tactile cues from hard to soft decreased resident tumor resection. Regardless of tumor complexity, significant differences were found between neurosurgeons, senior residents, and junior residents in efficiency index and ultrasonic aspirator path length index. Ultrasonic aspirator bimanual force ratio outlined significant differences between senior and junior residents, whereas coordination index demonstrated significant differences between junior residents and neurosurgeons. CONCLUSION: The NeuroTouch platform incorporating the simulated scenarios and metrics used differentiates novice from expert neurosurgical performance, demonstrating NeuroTouch face, content, and construct validity and the possibility of developing brain tumor resection proficiency performance benchmarks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".