Surgical Simulation
Surgical simulation allows students to learn and practice technical skills in a setting which permits time for reflection and discussion, without risk to patients, and in a pandemic, limits the risks to trainees and the broader community. Cadaveric or animal models may offer highly realistic platforms for training a range of surgical skills, but costs and facility requirements might limit their use and the transmission risk has not yet been studied. A range of physical and virtual reality simulators have been developed to address skills training in Oto-HNS (Javia & Sardesai, 2017). Physical simulators range from low complexity task trainers to high fidelity, 3D printed, models with anatomic and haptic feedback in all fields of surgery and for all training levels (Bur et al., 2017). Virtual reality (VR) simulation offers the ability not only to more accurately replicate complex anatomy, but also to introduce realistic pathology or mimic lifelike emergency situations. Existing VR environments applicable to head and neck surgical training include the da Vinci Skills Simulator (Zhang & Sumer, 2013) (Walliczek-Dworschak et al., 2017), the Endoscopic Sinus Surgery Simulator (ES3) (Edmond, 2002) (Fried et al., 2010), and a range of VR temporal bone drilling simulations (Wiet et al., 2002) (Zirkle, Roberson, Leuwer, & Dubrowski, 2007) (Sewell et al., 2008) (Zhao, Kennedy, Yukawa, Pyman, & O’Leary, 2011).