Surgical Metacognition

Surgical Metacognition: Smarter Decision-making for Surgeons is a groundbreaking yet practical guide to learning and teaching expert decision-making for surgeons.

From Mark Quirk, recipient of the 2006 Society of Teachers of Family Medicine's Excellence in Education award, comes the latest on improving medical education. In this volume, Quirk explores metacognition, the idea that we can think about the way we or other people think, and thus gain a better understanding of ourselves, our own cognitive processes, and the patients we seek to help. Written for medical educators--from medical school faculty to residents--this book will help you teach your students and interns how to extrapolate lessons from experience and integrate learning and practice. It will help them to think more clearly and thoroughly about what they read, hear, and learn on a day-to-day basis and thus become more informed and humanistic doctors.

The neurosurgical, surgical and medical training and practice models have to keep up with the technological revolution in the 21st Century as our lives changed on a swift base. Making bioethics and metacognition a cornerstone in medical education and practice will flourish our humane societies. Metacognition is thinking about one’s thinking, to plan, monitor and assess one’s understanding and performance. By adherence to medical ethics and Values-Based Medicine (VsBM) as guiding principles, we can develop benevolent medical practice. To enhance knowledge application, skills, and character qualities in realms beyond the immediate context in which they were learned. In this book, we developed a framework on how to evolve medical education and training by utilizing hi-tech. We divided the book into five principal components; Current and traditional root analysis of the learning process, Ethics and metacognition of education, learning and career development, Obstacles, difficulties and setbacks in learning and career development process, Learning in the digital era, and Mentorship. The author believes we are entering a new era of information technology, which will have a significant impact on the education, sciences, strategies and philosophy. Therefore, in preparation for this colossal transformation, the author brings together the best brains in the neurosurgical field from around the globe. Twenty distinguished Professors of Neurosurgery and educators from Canada, the USA, Colombia, the UK, Italy, the Netherland, India, Japan, China, Rwanda, Egypt and Saudi Arabia gathered their experiences and thoughts in this book to shade light on an evolving world that will be the norm in near future.

Minimally invasive surgery is a double-edged sword presenting both advantages and dangers to a patient. On the one hand, damage to healthy tissue is reduced and recovery periods are shorter. On the other hand, the surgeon is handicapped by degraded perceptual information so that the probability of certain types of errors is increased (e.g., cutting or damaging the common bile duct during laparoscopic cholecystectomy). In challenging cases surgeons continually assess whether the patient's best interest might be served by converting a laparoscopic case to an open-incision one. Converting widens the scope and quality of perceptual information available, providing hands and eyes with direct access to the operative area. This research focuses on surgical decision making in the context of the decision to convert. A cognitive task analysis effort, involving field observations and a research study, was undertaken to elicit information about decisions made during surgery. Ten experienced (staff) and ten senior resident surgeons were shown videotape from a difficult laparoscopic surgery case. The surgeons responded to structured questions at critical points in the procedure and also provided running commentary as the operation unfolded. Based on their observations, approximately half of the surgeons decided that the case should be converted to an open procedure at some point during the operation. The verbal protocols were analyzed to identify differences as a function of expertise (staff vs. resident) and of the conversion decision (opener vs. nonopener). Staff surgeons made significantly more inferences and predictions from perceptual information and expressed awareness of boundary conditions to safe operation more frequently than resident surgeons interviewed. Further, there was evidence for a lack of situation awareness for the residents who chose not to open.

This book provides comprehensive information on the etiology, pathophysiology, medical implications, diagnosis, and surgical and nonsurgical treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Divided into five parts, the book begins with principles and fundamentals of OSA and its diagnostic considerations. Subsequent parts then address non-surgical management, surgical management, and maxillomandibular advancements for OSA. Chapters seek to approach this common disorder from the viewpoint of multiple specialties, thereby promoting the development of a broad strategy for the evaluation and management of OSA patients that draws on each of them. An invaluable reference, Management of Obstructive Sleep Apnea: An Evidence-Based, Multidisciplinary Textbook meets the needs of advanced dental and medical students, orthodontic, maxillofacial, ENT, neurology, and plastic surgery residents, and sleep medicine and pulmonary physicians.​​

This book presents various skills to help surgeons improve their day-to-day performance and development including professionalism, communication, situation awareness, decision making, leadership, and technical dexterity. It also offers advice on how to organise a surgical theatre list, improve theatre efficiency, prepare for surgical interviews and participate in surgical research and audit. Furthermore, it emphasises the need to strive for safety in surgery and to learn from things going wrong. The complex world of emotions that surgeons may encounter is also discussed. The guidance presented here may be of value to any aspiring surgeon, whatever their surgical specialty, and wherever they choose to practise. The skills highlighted in this book reflect the author's initial experiences as a surgical trainee, the teachings of his senior trainers, as well as his subsequent involvement in supervising multiple junior surgeons as a Consultant in Trauma and Orthopaedics. Much of the material presented is supported by an extensive literature review. This book complements the previously published book "Career Skills for Doctors" by the same author.

This handbook is the first book ever covering the area of Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA). The field of MMLA is an emerging domain of Learning Analytics and plays an important role in expanding the Learning Analytics goal of understanding and improving learning in all the different environments where it occurs. The challenge for research and practice in this field is how to develop theories about the analysis of human behaviors during diverse learning processes and to create useful tools that could augment the capabilities of learners and instructors in a way that is ethical and sustainable. Behind this area, the CrossMMLA research community exchanges ideas on how we can analyze evidence from multimodal and multisystem data and how we can extract meaning from this increasingly fluid and complex data coming from different kinds of transformative learning situations and how to best feed back the results of these analyses to achieve positive transformative actions on those learning processes. This handbook also describes how MMLA uses the advances in machine learning and affordable sensor technologies to act as a virtual observer/analyst of learning activities. The book describes how this “virtual nature” allows MMLA to provide new insights into learning processes that happen across multiple contexts between stakeholders, devices and resources. Using such technologies in combination with machine learning, Learning Analytics researchers can now perform text, speech, handwriting, sketches, gesture, affective, or eye-gaze analysis, improve the accuracy of their predictions and learned models and provide automated feedback to enable learner self-reflection. However, with this increased complexity in data, new challenges also arise. Conducting the data gathering, pre-processing, analysis, annotation and sense-making, in a way that is meaningful for learning scientists and other stakeholders (e.g., students or teachers), still pose challenges in this emergent field. This handbook aims to serve as a unique resource for state of the art methods and processes. Chapter 11 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book provides a detailed guide to the ethical considerations involved when making decisions in surgery. Chapters feature a uniform format, which feature a case that represents a real-life problem, discussion of the medical indications of that issue, the latest available medical solutions, and related ethical considerations. In some cases, more in-depth debate is provided on why a particular decision should or should not be made based-upon ethical principles. Information boxes containing key statements and relevant data in clear easy-to-digest tables facilitates the reader in being able to assimilate the most important points covered in each chapter. Difficult Decisions in Surgical Ethics: An Evidence-Based Approach is a thorough review of ethical considerations in a range of surgical scenarios encompassing both adult and pediatric topics, training surgical residents, ethical care during a pandemic, critical care, palliative care, sensitivity to religious and ethnic mores, clinical research, and innovation. It is intended to be a vital resource for practicing and trainee surgeons seeking a comprehensive up-to-date resource on ethical topics in surgical practice. The work is part of the Difficult Decisions in Surgery series covering a range of surgical specialties.