Student Investigator: Ryan Chou (Pre-medical Biomedical Engineering major)

Mentor: Gregory D Hager

An ongoing effort by the healthcare community is directed towards understanding how novice surgeons become experts. Knowing what expert surgeons do that novices do not has the potential to greatly influence surgical training and assessment methods, and technologies. This project looks at septoplasty, a surgical procedure to remove asymmetrical parts of the nasal septum (which separates the two nostrils), specifically a phase where a surgeon must separate the mucosal flap (tissue) from the nasal septum (cartilage and bone). The objective of this study is to determine whether expert septoplasty surgeons can be differentiated from novices by their ability to move their instrument (cottle elevator) efficiently (in an optimal path) during the separation of the mucosa and the septum.