Crowdsourced assessment of surgical skills: A systematic review

Abstract

Introduction: Crowdsourced assessment utilizes a large group of untrained individuals from the general population to solve tasks in the medical field. The aim was to examine the correlation between crowd workers and expert surgeons for the use of crowdsourced assessments of surgical skills.

Material and methods: A systematic literature review was performed on April 14th, 2021 from inception to the present. Two reviewers screened all articles with eligibility criteria of inclusion and assessed for quality using The Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI) and Newcastle-Ottawa Scale-Education (NOS-E)(Holst et al., 2015).⁷General information was extracted for each article.

Results: 250 potential studies were identified, and 32 articles were included. There appeared to be a generally moderate to very strong correlation between crowd workers and experts (Cronbach's alpha 0.72-0.95, Pearson's r 0.7-0.95, Spearman Rho 0.7-0.89, linear regression 0.45-0.89). Six studies had either questionable or no significant correlation between crowd workers and experts.

Conclusion: Crowdsourced assessment can provide accurate, rapid, cost-effective, and objective feedback across different specialties and types of surgeries in dry lab, simulation, and live surgeries.

Keywords: Crowdsourced assessment; Skill assessment; Surgical education; Surgical skills.