K. H. Perrone1, H. Mohamadipanah1, F. C. Huang2, M. Garren2, A. Witt1, C. Pugh1 1Stanford University,Palo Alto, CA, USA 2University Of Wisconsin,Madison, WI, USA
Introduction:
Research supports the use of virtual reality (VR) as a screening tool for stratifying novices from experts based on psychomotor skills. However, little is known about the ability of VR to predict psychomotor skills longitudinally with one learner group as most studies focus on cross-sectional assessments of extremes of expertise. We hypothesize that VR will be able to serve as a valid longitudinal assessment for psychomotor skills in surgery residents.
Methods:
Surgical residents (N=26) participated in two consecutive years of data collection during their research time. Each year, participants placed a subclavian central line on a mannequin simulator and performed a path steering task in VR. During subclavian central line placement, hand movement data were collected from electromagnetic sensors and the number of clinical performance errors were tabulated. Central line data were then compared to the hand movement data calculated from the path steering task in the VR environment using parametric correlation analysis.
Results:
In the first year of participation, higher deviation of the hand from the desired path (steering error) in VR correlated positively to more time spent inserting the needle(r = +0.553, p<0.01), and more dominant hand jerkiness (r = +0.518, p<0.01) during subclavian central line placement (Table 1). In addition, more time spent (r = +0.466, p<0.05) and more dominant hand jerkiness (r = + 0.575, p<0.01) in VR also correlated significantly to a higher number of clinical performance errors during central line placement. In the second year of participation, however, we found that there were no correlations between VR metrics, motion metrics, and clinical performance errors during subclavian central line placement.
Conclusion:
Although there was a strong correlation during the first year, VR motion metrics did not sustainably correlate with motion metrics or clinical performance errors during central line placement in the second year. Of note, there was a small improvement in subclavian central line placement in year two, which suggests that the loss of correlation might be a result of participants learning through mental rehearsal and self-assessment during the interval between assessment year one and two. In addition, these VR tasks may simply have low sensitivity as a longitudinal screening tool for psychomotor skills.
