H. Mohamadipanah1, K. H. Perrone1, B. Wise1, C. Parthiban2, M. Zinn2, A. Witt1, C. Pugh1 1Stanford University,Palo Alto, CA, USA 2University Of Wisconsin,Madison, WI, USA
Introduction:
In surgery, time away from practice can lead to skills decay. Laboratory residents are thought to be prone to skills decay given their lack of experience and limited exposure to clinical activities. This study takes a cross-sectional approach to assessing differences in residents’ skills at the start and end of their laboratory years using Virtual Reality (VR). We hypothesize that laboratory residents will have measurable decay in psychomotor skills when evaluated using VR.
Methods:
Surgical residents (N=28) were divided into two groups based on where they were in their research time. The first group was just beginning their research time (N=19) and the second group (N=9) had just finished at least 2 years of research. All participants were asked to perform a target-tracking task using a haptic device in a VR environment (Figure 1). In this task participants used a stylus to follow a moving target on a screen. To challenge residents to demonstrate their psychomotor abilities, random distracting forces were applied to the stylus throughout the task with varying levels of force. Psychomotor skills demonstrated during this task include hand-eye coordination, motor-control, reaction time and error management. The metric investigated in this study was “Tracking Error”, defined as the average distance of the stylus to the center of the moving target. Analysis was conducted using a two-sample t-test.
Results:
The second group, who just finished their research time, showed a higher level of “Tracking Error”, when compared to the first group, who just started their research time, (mean 16.9±4.3mm vs 14.1±2.0mm; t(26)=2.39, p=0.0245).
Conclusion:
The increased “Tracking Error” among residents at the end of their research time suggests psychomotor skills decay in residents who spend time away from clinical duties in a laboratory. This decay demonstrates the need for research residents to regularly participate in clinical activities, simulation or assessment to minimize and monitor skills decay while away from clinical practice. Additional longitudinal studies may help to better map learning and decay curves for residents who spend time in the laboratory.
