• Tatjana Pastor, Jan Buschbaum, Mathilde von Laue, Björn-Christian Link, Frank J P Beeres, James Fletcher, Bergita Ganse, R Geoff Richards, Boyko Gueorguiev, and Torsten Pastor.
• AO Research Institute Davos, Davos, Switzerland.
• Eur J Trauma Emerg Surg. 2025 Jan 11; 51 (1): 77.

BackgroundDigitally Enhanced Hands-on Surgical Training (DEHST) platform was introduced to overcome the lack of training capabilities for the challenging task of freehand distal interlocking of intramedullary nails. It demonstrates high perceived realism for surgeons, and novices perform significantly better after DEHST training. However, characterization of how performance improves remained unexplored. The aim of this study was to evaluate the training progression of novices in freehand distal interlocking during five training rounds with DEHST and to compare their performance in a simulated operation against experienced surgeons.MethodsTen novices (Group 1) underwent five DEHST training sessions (approximately one hour in total) and their performance data was acquired and evaluated. The surgical performance of Group 1 was compared with ten surgical experts (Group 2) by performing distal interlocking of a real tibia nail in an artificial bone model in a simulated operation. Time taken, number of X-rays, accuracy of nail hole roundness, and success rates were compared between the groups.ResultsGroup 1 achieved comparable performance to Group 2 in number of X-rays 26.0 (range 15-40) versus 22.5 (range 16-34), p = 0.281, and accuracy of hole roundness 95.0% (range 91.1-98.0%) versus 93.3% (range 90.7-95.9%), p = 0.087. However, Group 1 needed significantly longer time compared with Group 2, p = 0.001, and furthermore, one participant in Group 1 (10%) failed to hit the nail hole with the drill bit, while 100% of the participants in Group 2 were successful.ConclusionsDEHST appears to be a useful tool to gradually improve the proficiency level of novices and to train relevant practical surgical skills needed for distal interlocking of intramedullary nails. However, further investigations are needed to demonstrate the performance under the conditions of a real operation.© 2025. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany.

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