Survey of Current Surgical Competency Assessment and a Possible Role for Virtual Reality Simulation.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: To survey Ophthalmology Residency program directors and chairmen regarding current surgical competency assessment trends and opinions on the role of virtual reality surgical simulation. METHODS: A 23 question survey was sent to the membership of the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology (AUPO), which includes residency program directors and chairmen from 120 ophthalmology training programs in the United States and Canada. Questions encompassed current surgical assessment methods for residents, the respondent’s virtual reality experience, and the respondent’s opinions on virtual reality simulation RESULTS: A total of 106 responses (44.2%) from 83 different residency programs (69.2%) were received. 86.7% of programs had functional wetlabs with 87.7% of respondents believing that wetlabs were beneficial. Experience with virtual reality simulation was limited to only having heard of the technology in 76.4% of respondents, 59.4% have seen a VR simulator, 34.9% have hands-on experience with VR simulator, and 2.8% use VR simulation in training. Those with higher familiarity scores had a stepwise more favorable opinion of VR with regards to patient safety, surgical curriculum, and awareness/acceptance by residents and faculty. CONCLUSIONS The community of ophthalmology educators is grappling with the issue of ACGME-mandated competency-based assessment in general and surgical competency appraisal tools in particular. The selection of assessment methods varies widely from program to program. Two different programs may use a similar number of assessment methods but completely different methods of assessment. This lack of uniformity can be corrected by implementation of objective, efficacious methods that are used across the board and serve as a standard of assessment among residency programs. VR is one such possibility of standardized assessment. While VR is considered relatively advanced technology, it is a rather new tool and its efficacy as a method of assessment has not been adequately gauged. Furthermore, awareness of VR is low as is knowledge regarding its possible incorporation into surgical curriculum. Perception of VR, familiarity with usage of VR, obstacles faced in incorporating VR into curriculum, and the issue of whether or not it is even a valid assessment tool were addressed in this study. The results of this survey support virtual reality as a means of delivering a surgical curriculum that is safe for the patient and accepted by residents and faculty. Conversely, cost is viewed as a detractor from full implementation. The acquisition of surgical skills and transferability of surgical skills gained through virtual reality simulation has not been substantiated according to the opinions of those surveyed. The results of the survey shed some light on the residency programs’ current opinions of VR, but more definitive research is needed to prove the benefit of virtual reality in the operating room.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".