Translating surgical metrics into automated assessments.

In the effort to promote more continuous and quantitative assessment of surgical proficiency, there is an increased need to define and establish common surgical metrics. Furthermore, as various pressures such as limited duty hours and access to educational resources, including materials and expertise, place increased demands on training, the value of quantitative automated assessment becomes increasingly apparent. We present our methods to establish common surgical metrics within the otology and neurotology community and our initial efforts in the subsequent transfer of these metrics into objective automated assessments provided via a simulation environment.