The Development of a Cerebral Hemispheric Surgery Simulator and its Evaluation for Epilepsy Neurosurgical Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The origins and scope of this research thesis stems from the alarming statistic that 10.1 million people worldwide are potential surgical candidates. This number is projected to increase by 1.4 million annually. Epilepsy surgery requires mastery of an eloquent set of skills which are sometimes hard to acquire in a work-hour restricted surgical training environment. Simulation in surgical education has been endorsed as a valid supplement to clinical surgical training through a reduction in the technical learning curve. The scope of the research within this manuscript, on a macro-scale, spans both the biomedical engineering sciences and the field of surgical education. On a micro-scale the concepts of fractals, dimensions and material properties are harnessed to develop a simulator which is subsequently evaluated as a tool for the behaviorist, cognitivist and constructivist learning of a spectrum of epilepsy surgery techniques.The aim of the research was to develop a high fidelity cerebral hemispheric surgery simulator utilizing 3D printing- based technology and re-engineering the use of existing materials, to promote surgical education through hands-on-training of surgical epilepsy techniques. Leonardo da Vinci’s ingenuity of injecting hot wax into the cerebral ventricles of an ox is the earliest documentation of the use of a solidifying medium to recreate a phantom of an internal body organ. Over 500 years later similar techniques are still popularly used. This thesis describes ways of addressing this materials innovation gap. Over time the research project evolved from a focus on the novelty of designing a simulator to an emphasis on practical application of the technology through qualitative analysis. The thesis title: ‘The development of a cerebral hemispheric surgery simulator and its evaluation for epilepsy neurosurgical education’ encompasses both design and validation aspects and introduces the broad nature of epilepsy surgery procedures captured within this single simulator. The core methods consisted of two parts: the engineering process of the cerebral hemispheric surgery simulator and the evaluation of the invention for face, content, construct, and criterion validity. Ultimately, the results and conclusions are supportive of an invention that harnesses the strengths of biomedical engineering for the advancement of neurosurgical education.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".