Evaluation of the "Teaching Guide for Basic Laparoscopic Skills" as a stand-alone educational tool for hands-on...

Standardization of hands-on training (HoT) has profoundly impacted the educational field in the last decade. To provide quality training sessions on a global scale, the European School of Urology Training group developed a teaching guide for tutors in 2015. Our study aims to understand whether this guide alone can provide information enough to match the performance improvement guaranteed by an expert tutor.

4 randomized groups of participants underwent HoT sessions with different teaching modalities: an expert surgeon (group 1), an expert E-BLUS tutor (group 2), E-BLUS guide alone (group 3), no tutor (group 4). Groups 1 and 2 were respectively provided with two different tutors to avoid biases related to personal tutor ability. Along the training session, each participant could perform five trials on two E-BLUS tasks: Peg transfer and Knot tying. During trials 1 and 5, completion time and number of errors were recorded for analysis with Pi-score algorithm. The average per-group Pi-scores were then compared to measure different performance improvement results.

60 participants from Italy were enrolled and randomized into four groups of 15. Pi-scores recorded on Peg transfer task were 24,6 (group 1), 26,4 (group 2), 42,2 (group 3), 11,7 (group 4). Pi-scores recorded on Knot tying task were 33,2 (group 1), 31,3 (group 2), 37,5 (group 3), 18,6 (group 4).

Compared to a human tutor, standardized teaching with the EBLUS guide may produce similar performance improvement. This evidence opens doors to automated teaching and to several novelties in hands-on training.