INTRODUCTION Recently, efforts have been undertaken to enhance the face validity of technical skills training by introducing role-plays and standardised patients. Since little is known about the effects of role-playing with respect to the realism of a training situation and students' objective performance, we performed a randomized controlled trial. METHODS 36 medical students participated in...

Most approaches in sense disambiguation have been restricted to supervised training over manually annotated, non-technical, English corpora. Application to a new language or technical domain requires extensive manual annotation of appropriate training corpora. As this is both expensive and inefficient, unsupervised methods are to be preferred, specifically in technical domains such as medicine....

Simulation training, where a scenario or setting is replicated, is now firmly associated with surgical training. Involving both technical and non-technical competencies, it provides a valuable tool in training new skills to both new and current surgeons. As patient safety becomes more of a focus, alongside advances in technology and surgical techniques, there is a continued concern regarding op...

Unintended harm to patients in operating theatres is common. Correlations have been demonstrated between teamwork skills and error rates in theatres. This was a single-institution uncontrolled before-after study of the effects of "non-technical" skills training on attitudes, teamwork, technical performance and clinical outcome in laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) and carotid endarterectomy (CEA...

The objective of this study is to determine factors affecting the technical efficiency of the inshore fisheries in Kuala Terengganu. Data for the study was collected from a survey conducted between June and August 2007 where 100 fishermen in 14 villages were chosen by stratified sampling. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Tobit analysis were employed to determine the technical efficiency leve...

Over the past decade, driven by advances in educational theory and pressures for efficiency in the clinical environment, there has been a shift in surgical education and training towards enhanced simulation training. Microsurgery is a technical skill with a steep competency learning curve on which the clinical outcome greatly depends. This paper investigates the evidence for educational and tra...

This paper describes the development of the Injection Moulding Process Expert System (IMPRESS). The IMPRESS system diagnoses faults in injection moulding machinery which lead to dirt or other contamination appearing in the plastic mouldings which are produced. This KBS has recently been put into use at Plastic Engineers (Scotland) Ltd, and is proving useful both as an expert assistant when tech...