Project Details
Description
PROJECT SUMMARY
Surgical technical skills directly impact patient outcomes. There remains a need for objective, accurate, and
inexpensive methods to measure such skills in a manner that can scale to the large number of surgical
residents and practitioners. The long term goal of this research program is to improve surgical training and
assessment by establishing more scientifically-rigorous foundations for accurate, objective evaluation of
surgical technical skills and their relationship to surgical outcomes. The overall objective of this research
proposal is to determine the biases, limitations, and absolute accuracy inherent in the putative gold standard
of surgical technical skill evaluation—review of video footage by a panel of human raters—across
representative procedures in three surgical specialties: urology, gynecology, and orthopedic surgery. The
central hypothesis is that both expert and non-expert raters are subject to unconscious bias and limitations in
their capacity to evaluate surgical technical skills objectively and accurately. This will have positive impact on
advancing the science and improving the practice of surgical skill evaluation for surgical residency programs.
The research will answer the following questions, at least for representative procedures from urology (robotic
prostatectomy), gynecology (robotic hysterectomy), and orthopedic surgery (hip fracture fixation and pedicle
screw placement).
1. What is the magnitude of identity bias (gender, ethnicity, etc.) in the evaluation of surgical technical skills?
a. How do ratings change from the control condition (identity-blind) to identity-visible for gender, race, age,
or perceived reputation?
b. How does this bias change across skill levels? (e.g. preliminary evidence shows that perceived females
are docked more severely than males among novice skill levels, but less so at proficient levels).
c. How much do faculty semester evaluations of resident technical skill (current widespread practice) differ
from identity-blind skill evaluation (anonymized review of video)? Especially across gender?
2. What is the optimal user interface and conditions for identity-blind web-enabled review of surgical video
that maximize skill discrimination and minimize reviewer resource cost?
3. What is the absolute accuracy of human raters? i.e., how imperfect is the gold-standard of technical skill
evaluation
Status | Active |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 8/18/21 → 7/31/24 |
Funding
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering: $341,357.00
- National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering: $353,732.00
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