47 Outcomes and potential impact of a virtual hands-on training program on MRI staging confidence and performance in rectal cancer 3 replaced by remote platforms. While face-to-face training is still essential for procedural training, remote platforms have provided accessibility and have enabled sharing of individual teaching sessions to geographically remote regions. The future of radiology training will likely involve a blend of remote and in-person learning, with virtual teaching remaining a (more) prevalent component. Setting up effective web-based training and teaching platforms is an important element of success in order to develop high-quality online educational programs. A fast and intuitive DICOM viewing platform is required to offer case-based training. Ideally, such a platform should allow data upload from different sources to share case studies and exchange experiences. In addition, it is essential to give participants a hands-on experience in an online format with dedicated feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes. Individual contact with experienced readers also contributes to the learning experience. With our current course setup, we have tried to bring these elements together. Areas of improvement for the future will be to enable individual case upload and to further expand the level of personal and individualized feedback on a case-by-case basis. This study has several limitations. First, we cannot rule out a certain selection bias among the study readers considering that participation required a registration fee and will likely have attracted mainly participants with a specific interest (or even preference) for online teaching. The pre- and post-course tests were included in our course setup to allow a first analysis of the outcomes of virtual training, but numbers were deliberately kept small so not to cause an unnecessary extra burden for the participants. The number of test-cases is therefore too small to draw more meaningful and statistically powered conclusions. Moreover, considering the small number of cases, primary staging and restaging results were grouped together while we recognize that these are two distinctly different clinical settings. Also, not all clinical scenarios were represented in the test cases (e.g. no mucinous tumours or cases with tumour deposits were included), which further limits the impact of the study results for these respective staging items. We therefore fully acknowledge that our results must be regarded as exploratory and larger studies should be conducted to further study the effectiveness of online teaching in our current course format. That being said our results are encouraging and support the ongoing development of online education. In conclusion – though we fully acknowledge that our results are mainly exploratory –, we have shown that a dedicated virtual training course using a web-based platform has potential as an alternative (or addition) to face-to-face training to help radiologists in improving their skills and confidence to stage rectal cancers on MRI.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw