One of the most crucial aspects of training first-year surgeons is ensuring that they acquire surgical skills prior to entering the operating room (OR). This study attempts to define a more accurate method of assessing and measuring surgical skills when fixing a hip fracture with a guide wire. The measuring system currently used today, which is widely described as a fairly accurate predictor of fracture fixation failure, can be quite subjective and prone to inaccuracies. This study introduces an alternative method of measurement that quantifies the deviation of guide wire trajectory from an ideal path. We believe that this method is helpful for surgeons to understand the importance of guide wire trajectory, and its application can be extended to both surgical simulation and the OR.
Additionally, this study introduces a preliminary experiment that examines the transfer of surgical skills from a hip fracture simulator to a setting that closely resembles the OR. Surgical simulators can be of great benefit to first year surgeons as they look to improve their surgical skills. Surgeons must learn to balance their time appropriately due to the presence of fluoroscopy, which emits radiation, while placing the implant in a satisfactory position. Significant improvements were found in procedural time and the number of fluoroscopic images requested in an OR setting after thirty minutes of simulator use. It is possible that the surgeons were not given enough time to practice on the simulator, so a new experimental design and more subjects will hopefully show more significant improvements after simulator intervention.