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Published on: September 18, 2017
Telementoring versus on-site mentoring in virtual reality-based surgical training
L Panait1, A Rafiq, V Tomulescu
1Department of Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Post Office Box 980480, Richmond, VA 23298, USA.
Surgical Endoscopy
|October 26, 2005
Summary
Telementoring, combined with virtual reality surgical simulation, offers comparable surgical skills training to local mentoring. This approach effectively improves performance in tasks like grasping, cutting, and suturing.
Area of Science:
- Medical Education
- Surgical Training
- Virtual Reality Simulation
Background:
- Telementoring serves as a supplementary method for surgical training.
- Virtual reality surgical simulation is a key tool in modern surgical education.
- Telementoring is hypothesized to be as effective as in-person mentorship.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the efficacy of telementoring in surgical skills acquisition.
- To compare telementoring with traditional local mentoring in a virtual reality setting.
Main Methods:
- 20 medical students trained using LapSim virtual reality simulator.
- Participants were divided into telementored (US-based, via videoconferencing) and local mentor groups.
- Surgical skill performance was assessed by measuring tool path length and task completion time before and after training.
Main Results:
- Both telementoring and local mentoring groups showed significant improvements in surgical task performance (p < 0.05).
- Performance gains were observed in grasping, cutting, and suturing tasks.
- No significant differences in performance were found between the telementored and locally mentored groups for clip-applying tasks.
Conclusions:
- Integrating instructional media with telementoring is as effective as local mentoring for surgical skill development.
- Telementoring is a viable and effective method for surgical training, especially when utilizing virtual reality simulators.
