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Updated: May 25, 2026
Re-Arterialized Rat Partial Liver Transplantation with an in vivo Vessel-Oriented 70% Hepatectomy
Published on: April 8, 2018
Preliminary experience of a PDCA-cycle and quality management based training curriculum for rat liver transplantation
1Research Group of Experimental Surgery, Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, University Hospital Essen, University of Duisburg and Essen, Essen, Germany.
Background:
As repeatedly operating rat liver transplantation (LTx) until animals survive is inefficient in respect to time and use of living animals, we developed a new training concept. METHODS AND CONCEPTS: Training was divided into four phases: pretraining-phase, basic-microsurgical-training phase, advanced-microsurgical-training phases, and expert-microsurgical-training phase. Two "productivity-phases" were introduced right after the basic- and advanced-microsurgical-training phases, respectively, to allow the trainee to accumulate experience and to be scientifically productive before proceeding to a more complex procedure. PDCA cycles and quality criteria were employed to control the learning-process and the surgical quality. Predefined quality criteria included survival rate, intraoperative, postoperative, and histologic parameters.
Results:
Three trainees participated in the LTx training and achieved their first survival record within 4-10 operations. All of them completely mastered the LTx in fewer procedures (31, 60 and 26 procedures) as reported elsewhere, and the more complex arterialized or partial LTx were mastered by trainee A and B in additional 9 and 13 procedures, respectively. Fast progress was possible due to a high number of training in the 2 Productivity-phases.
Conclusion:
The stepwise and PDCA-based training program increased the efficiency of LTx training, whereas the constant application and development of predefined quality criteria guaranteed the quality of microsurgery.
