Background Despite the critical importance of cricothyroidotomy (CCT) for patient in extremis, clinical experience with cricothyroidotomy is infrequent, and current training tools are inadequate. The long-term goal is to develop a Virtual Airway Skills Trainer (VAST) that requires a thorough task analysis to determine the critical procedural steps, learning metrics, and parameters for assessment. Methods Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) is performed to describe major tasks and subtasks for CCT. A rubric for performance scoring for each task was derived and possible operative errors were identified. Results Time series analyses for seven CCT videos were performed with three different observers. According to Pearson's correlation tests, three of the seven major tasks had a strong correlation between their task times and performance scores. Conclusion The task analysis forms the core of a proposed virtual cricothyroidotomy simulator, and highlights links between performance time and accuracy when teaching individual surgical steps of the procedure.

We elaborated ESD tasks and developed quantitative performance metrics used in analysis of actual surgery performance. These ESD metrics will be used in future validation studies of our VESS simulator.

No abstract