METHODS article
Front. Med.
Sec. Healthcare Professions Education
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1591043
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovations and Challenges in Surgical EducationView all 13 articles
Reliability Volume: A Novel Metric for Surgical Skill Evaluation
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Physics and Electronic Information, Yan'an University, Yan'an, China
- 2Yan'an University Affiliated Hospital, Yan'an, China
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This study introduces Reliability Volume (RV), an integrated metric combining trajectory similarity with empirical reliability estimation using threshold counts to evaluate surgical skill during repetitive training. RV quantifies both spatial precision and the probability of consistent task execution, addressing limitations of single-session metrics that neglect fatigue and performance drift. Applied to knot-tying with assistive devices, RV jointly reflects spatial accuracy and performance consistency over multiple sessions. Our results show that RV reliably tracks learning progression and is readily compatible with real-time (closed-loop) feedback systems, providing a dynamic, comprehensive, and practice-oriented assessment framework.
Keywords: surgical skill, Repetitive training, Trajectory similarity, Reliability, Fatigue
Received: 20 Mar 2025; Accepted: 28 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhipu, Qinghua and jin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yu Zhipu, School of Physics and Electronic Information, Yan'an University, Yan'an, China
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