Madison Objective Self-Assessment Tool: A Reliable and User-Friendly Approach for Objective Self-Assessment in...

Thorough and objective assessment is of utmost importance for any microsurgical laboratory training, allowing trainees to identify areas needing further improvement. The ideal assessment tool should be objective, reliable, self-administered, and easy to implement. Building on this necessity, the aim of this study was to establish an objective, reliable, and self-administered assessment tool for microsurgical laboratory training, enabling trainees to independently practice and assess their own results.

Eight trainees completed the Baskaya Microvascular Bypass Training Curriculum using a basic microsurgery training kit. Each trainee evaluated their 31 end products twice with the newly introduced Madison Objective Self-Assessment Tool (MOST). Subsequently, the same expert independently evaluated each trainee's end products once. These 3 sets of evaluations were compared using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) to determine the reliability of the new self-assessment tool, both intrarater and interrater.

The findings demonstrated that, aside from 2 exercises, the agreement levels for both interrater and intrarater ranged from excellent (ICC >0.90) to acceptable (ICC = 0.61-0.80). For the silicone tube (2 mm) end-to-end anastomosis with 9-0, the interrater ICC showed fair agreement, at 0.32 [-0.10 to 0.63], and for the chicken vessels side-to-side anastomosis with 10-0, interrater ICC demonstrated moderate agreement at 0.52 [0.16-0.76]. These results underscore the reliability of MOST. In addition, participant feedback highlighted its ease of use, requiring merely a few minutes to evaluate each end product.

This study has demonstrated that the MOST is an effective, objective, and reliable tool for self-evaluation in microvascular anastomosis training, demonstrating high levels of agreement across most exercises and offering a user-friendly experience for trainees. This underscores its suitability as a valuable resource for enabling self-driven microvascular anastomosis training and assessment, especially in places where expert evaluation is unavailable.