1. Correlation between operative time and crowd-sourced skills assessment for robotic bariatric surgery.
- Author
-
Addison, Poppy, Yoo, Andrew, Duarte-Ramos, Jacqueline, Addy, Jermyn, Dechario, Samuel, Husk, Gregg, Jarrett, Mark, Teixeira, Julio, Antonacci, Anthony, and Filicori, Filippo
- Subjects
BARIATRIC surgery ,DEPTH perception ,SLEEVE gastrectomy ,LIKERT scale ,STAPLERS (Surgery) ,ABILITY ,SURGICAL robots - Abstract
Introduction: Operative time has been traditionally used as a proxy for surgical skill and is commonly utilized to measure the learning curve, assuming that faster operations indicate a more skilled surgeon. The Global Evaluative Assessment of Robotic Skills (GEARS) rubric is a validated Likert scale for evaluating technical skill. We hypothesize that operative time will not correlate with the GEARS score. Methods: Patients undergoing elective robotic sleeve gastrectomy at a single bariatric center of excellence hospital from January 2019 to March 2020 were captured in a prospectively maintained database. For step-specific scoring, videos were broken down into three steps: ligation of short gastric vessels, gastric transection, and oversewing the staple line. Overall and step-specific GEARS scores were assigned by crowd-sourced evaluators. Correlation between operative time and GEARS score was assessed with linear regression and calculation of the R
2 statistic. Results: Sixty-eight patients were included in the study, with a mean operative time of 112 ± 27.4 min. The mean GEARS score was 20.1 ± 0.81. Mean scores for the GEARS subcomponents were: bimanual dexterity 4.06 ± 0.17; depth perception 3.96 ± 0.24; efficiency 3.82 ± 0.19; force sensitivity 4.06 ± 0.20; robotic control 4.16 ± 0.21. Operative time and overall score showed no correlation (R2 = 0.0146, p = 0.326). Step-specific times and scores showed weak correlation for gastric transection (R2 = 0.0737, p = 0.028) and no correlation for ligation of short gastric vessels (R2 = 0.0262, p = 0.209) or oversewing the staple line (R2 = 0.0142, p = 0.344). Conclusions: Operative time and crowd-sourced GEARS score were not correlated. Operative time and GEARS scores measure different performance characteristics, and future studies should consider using both a validated skills assessment tool and operative time for a more complete evaluation of skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF