Training on a vascular interventional simulator: an observational study

Radiology registrars were observed performing a left renal artery angioplasty using a proprietary training simulator up to five times during their first year of training. Total procedure time, fluoroscopy times, and metric information from the machine were recorded. Each step of the procedure was judged by an observer and a mistake profile was generated. Fifty-two runs were completed by 12 trainees. The mean procedure time decreased from 16.6 min to 9.8 min over the five runs. The number of mistakes ranged from zero to ten and the mean number of mistakes made varied from 0.7 to 2.6 per procedure without any particular trend. Our study demonstrates that training on the simulator does improve performance. The mistakes made throughout training indicates the potential benefit from further simulator training. It remains unclear how to integrate this form of training in current educational programs.