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Updated: Dec 23, 2025
Author Spotlight: Segmentation and VR for Advanced Neurovascular Interventions
Published on: April 5, 2024
Surgeons With Five or More Actual Cricothyrotomies Perform Significantly Better on a Virtual Reality Simulator
Di Qi1, Emil Petrusa2, Uwe Kruger3
1Center for Modeling, Simulation, and Imaging in Medicine, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
Background:
Discriminating performance of learners with varying experience is essential to developing and validating a surgical simulator. For rare and emergent procedures such as cricothyrotomy (CCT), the criteria to establish such groups are unclear. This study is to investigate the impact of surgeons' actual CCT experience on their virtual reality simulator performance and to determine the minimum number of actual CCTs that significantly discriminates simulator scores. Our hypothesis is that surgeons who performed more actual CCT cases would perform better on a virtual reality CCT simulator.
Methods:
47 clinicians were recruited to participate in this study at the 2018 annual conference of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons. We established groups based on three different experience thresholds, that is, the minimal number of CCT cases performed (1, 5, and 10), and compared simulator performance between these groups.
Results:
Participants who had performed more clinical cases manifested higher mean scores in completing CCT simulation tasks, and those reporting at least 5 actual CCTs had significantly higher (P = 0.014) simulator scores than those who had performed fewer cases. Another interesting finding was that classifying participants based on experience level, that is, attendings, fellows, and residents, did not yield statistically significant differences in skills related to CCT.
Conclusions:
The simulator was sensitive to prior experience at a threshold of 5 actual CCTs performed.
