130 - Visualizing Clinical Anatomy: A Pilot Study Utilizing Robotic Surgery Case Videos to Supplement Medical School Anatomy Education

Poster Board Number: 130
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Abstract Body : Introduction: There has been a shift in medical student anatomy education to incorporate a greater variety of virtual resources to supplement traditional classroom education. While various approaches to virtual resources have been described, few incorporate surgical video or images. The increasing prevalence of robotic surgery provides countless hours of intraoperative footage which can be processed for medical student anatomy education. The objective of this pilot study was to create a series of surgical case videos to supplement the medical student anatomy curriculum and gather student feedback on their experience.

Materials and Methods: A series of five surgical case videos and write-ups were created by an interprofessional team consisting of an anatomist, surgeon, and medical student. Video was utilized from the following procedures: left upper lobectomy, esophagectomy, sleeve gastrectomy, cholecystectomy, and ventral hernia repair. Patient consent for video recording was obtained as part of consent for surgery. Videos were edited to a length of 5-10 minutes and labels were added throughout the video to highlight the relevant clinical and surgical anatomy. Each video had a corresponding case write-up including learning objectives, background and indications for surgery, patient presentation, a written overview of the video, and questions to reinforce important anatomical concepts. The videos and case write-ups were provided as supplemental resources during a first-year integrated anatomy course. At the end of the course, students were administered an optional survey containing 18 questions pertaining to their experience with the videos and perceptions towards a surgical career. There were 4 open-ended questions and 14 questions using a 5-point Likert scale with a score of 1 representing “strongly disagree” and 5 representing “strongly agree”. This study was determined to be exempt by the IRB.

Results: Likert-scale question responses are reported as (Mean +/- SD). There were 11 students who responded to the survey, of which 91% either strongly agreed or agreed that the surgical case videos were an effective learning tool (4.6 +/- 0.5). Survey respondents overall agreed that the case write-ups (3.8 +/- 0.7) and questions (4.1 +/- 0.8) reinforced understanding of the videos. Most participants also agreed that incorporating audio narration would be useful for future videos (4.3 +/- 1.0). Importantly, the majority of respondents agreed with the statement that these videos were still useful to someone who is not interested in surgery (4.6 +/- 0.7). Participants agreed with the statements that adding more videos (4.6 +/- 0.6) and integrating the videos more formally into classroom learning would be useful (4.2 +/- 0.8). When asked about what other operations or organ systems students would like covered in the future, responses included cardiac surgeries, orthopedic surgeries (such as ACL or meniscus repair), surgeries involving the retroperitoneum, and pelvic surgeries.

Conclusion: In this study, we describe our pilot implementation of a robotic surgery case video series in a first-year integrated medical anatomy course. Overall, survey respondents had a positive experience with the case videos and felt that addition of more videos would be useful. Future studies should work to measure the effect of surgical case videos on student learning of clinical anatomy and explore other applications of surgical videos in medical student education.