37 Outcomes and potential impact of a virtual hands-on training program on MRI staging confidence and performance in rectal cancer 3 Introduction MRI plays a crucial part in the diagnostic workup of patients with rectal cancer and is nowadays the standard imaging tool for local staging and to guide treatment planning. Radiologists are an important member of the multidisciplinary team (MDT) where the quality of their diagnostic image interpretation and reporting directly impacts patient management. Several studies have shown that this quality is highly dependent on the radiologist’s experience level and that dedicated training and teaching are essential for radiologists to achieve a diagnostic performance level sufficient to guide MDT decisions[1–4]. In addition to national radiologist training programs, different national and international scientific organizations offer focused rectal imaging courses and workshops, led by expert radiologists. A recent study from Denmark by Bregendahl et al. evaluated the impact of various educational elements on the interpretative performance of radiologists in staging rectal cancer on MRI. They showed that it was mainly individual (hands-on) feedback that significantly improved radiologists’ performance, whereas no significant effect was observed after lecture-based teaching workshops or independent case readings only[1]. Though effective, organizing such hands-on face-to-face training courses is a costly, time and labor-intensive endeavour. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has furthermore had a significant negative impact on the delivery of radiology training and teaching. At the same time, it has given rise to new ways of virtual education. Remote training platforms and virtual teaching alternatives such as webinars and simulated MDTs have rapidly evolved in the past years and will likely continue to form a central component of future education, even now that lockdown restrictions have largely ended[5]. Ideally, the benefits of virtual and hands-on training should be combined into one program, which is why in 2022, we developed a novel virtual hands-on training course focused on MRI of rectal cancer. This training course combines individual case-based training with webinars and online hands-on expert teaching via a newly developed web platform. In this paper we have evaluated the outcomes of the first edition of our virtual training course aiming to explore – in a preliminary analysis using a limited number of test cases – the effectiveness of this approach and its potential impact on the diagnostic performance, confidence and interobserver reproducibility of radiologists in the local staging and restaging of rectal cancer on MRI.
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