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A New Era of Ophthalmic Surgical Training:
A High Fidelity Surgical Simulator and Performance Driven Training

The emergence of a high-fidelity simulator for intraocular surgery, VRmagic’s EYESI®, allows unprecedented repetition of procedures in a virtual environment.  However, the availability of a high-fidelity simulator is not enough.  The simulator must serve as a vehicle for the ophthalmology profession to take advantage of lessons learned by high reliability organizations such as commercial aviation.  Aviation training systems employ systematic task breakdown and analysis that leads to score-dependent gated progression to higher level training.  This sophisticated and comprehensive approach fully exploits simulation to achieve rapid and cost-effective performance gains.  To achieve this goal, four groups have joined forces: The National Retina Institute Research and Education Foundation and its Task Assessment-based Skills and Competency system (TASC) advisory board of experienced ophthalmic surgeons and educators, Aviation Training Consulting, LLC (ATC), and VRmagic.  The TASC training system is being developed as an add-on to the EYESI® simulator.

The net impact of coupling systematic task analysis and performance-based gated progression with high-fidelity simulation is a revolution in training for ophthalmology. Improvements in quality, standardized training, shorter training time, faster technique optimization, reduced cost of training, and standardized training updates for advanced surgeons all facilitate and standardize credentialing.  In addition, development and evaluation of new techniques and new instruments will be accelerated via virtual experimentation.  Click here to read entire article.