Does a virtual simulation teaching platform improve surgical training for medical undergraduate students?

The practical teaching of surgery is a critical component of medical education, but traditional teaching methods often lack the interactive, hands-on experience necessary to master surgical techniques.The advent of virtual simulation technology offers the opportunity to enhance traditional teaching methods by providing students with a more immersive and interactive learning experience. However, research on which teaching projects offer significant advantages in surgery virtual simulation remains limited.

To explore the effect of a virtual simulation teaching platform on the practical teaching of surgery for medical undergraduates.

We randomly selected students from Class 1 to Class 4 of the Clinical Medicine major who enrolled at Wannan Medical College in 2021 as participants. Students in the control group received traditional classroom teaching and surgical video playback, whereas those in the experimental group, in addition to these traditional methods, used a self-developed virtual simulation teaching platform ( https://www.ilab-x.com/details/page?id=10666&prev=1 ) for practice. Posttraining assessments were conducted for both groups, including tests involving anatomical knowledge of gastrointestinal diseases, the virtual simulation of laparoscopic appendectomy, and simulator-based laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying, alongside a learning satisfaction questionnaire.

This study ultimately included 128 students (66 in the experimental group and 62 in the control group). No significant differences were observed between the two groups in terms of gender, age, or initial admission score (P > 0.05), thus indicating that the groups were comparable at baseline. Students in the experimental group obtained significantly higher scores on the anatomical knowledge test of gastrointestinal diseases (79.44 ± 7.43 points) and the virtual simulation of laparoscopic appendectomy (74.06 ± 8.34 points) than did those in the control group (73.95 ± 6.25 points and 71.18 ± 6.52 points, respectively) (P < 0.001). However, no significant differences were observed between students in the experimental group (66.08 ± 3.97 points) and those in the control group (65.15 ± 3.82 points) in term of their scores on the simulator-based laparoscopic suturing and knot-tying test (P > 0.05). The learning satisfaction scores reported by students in the experimental group (83.08 ± 9.74 points) were significantly higher than those reported by students in the control group (76.03 ± 5.36 points) (P < 0.001).

The results of this study indicate that the virtual simulation teaching platform has a positive effect on the practical teaching of surgical surgery for medical undergraduates, thus highlighting novel ideas and methods for surgical education.