VCath at the 2015 Neurosurgery Bootcamp

The Neurosurgical National Selection Board is responsible for recruiting those medical students who wish to specialise in neurosurgery following their foundation training. Those who are selected are invited to a bootcamp where they receive an intensive week of lectures and practical skills sessions prior to commencing their specialty registrar post. We were able to attend the 2015 bootcamp in Manchester this September to conduct a validation study on our VCath training tool. This was in collaboration with our collaborators from the Leeds General Infirmary and Bangor University. At the 2014 bootcamp we were able to demonstrate that the iPad version of VCath did improve the trainees accuracy in carrying out a ventricular catheterisation procedure (John et al., 2015). This year, we have a new version of VCath that uses the zSpace stereoscopic display. The validation study has been designed to investigate any difference in the performance of the trainees who practiced using the iPad version, the zSpace version, or no version of VCath. 30 trainees were at the bootcamp and they were divided into one of these three groups. The results of the study will be available soon.

Related Publications

1. John, N. W., Phillips, N. I., ap Cenydd, L., Coope, D., Carleton-Bland, N., Kamaly-Asl, I., & Grey, W. P. (2015). A Tablet-based virtual environment for neurosurgery training. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 24(2), 155–162. [bib]