Abstract
Palpation is an important clinical skill in both veterinary and medical health professions. The present study compares the ability of practicing veterinarians and veterinary students to identify the stiffness of virtual surfaces through palpation. An absolute identification paradigm was used where a force-feedback haptic device rendered virtual surfaces with five levels of stiffness within a "clinically relevant" range (0.2-0.5 N/mm). The mean information transfer was 0.97 bits (almost two perfectly identifiable stiffness levels) for 12 veterinarians and 0.58 bits (one correctly identified level) for 14 veterinary students. Although the difference between the two groups was significant (p <; 0.001), neither group was able to reliably identify more than two levels of stiffness, indicating that the success of veterinarians in clinical practice probably relies on additional properties such as size, shape, and texture. Analyses of force versus time and displacement versus time recordings suggest that the superior performance of the veterinarians may be partially attributable to motor strategy. Specifically, veterinarians used a greater mean maximum force (2.0 N) compared to students (1.6 N) (p <; 0.05). However, further studies are required to investigate motor strategy in more detail. The implications of our findings for veterinary education and quantitative skill assessment are discussed.
Highlights
IN both human and veterinary medicine, health professionals use palpation as part of many clinical examinations
We sought to answer the following research question: Is there a perceptual difference between experts and novices in terms of stiffness judgments? By comparing the abilities of veterinarians with those of veterinary students, we investigated if stiffness perception is affected by clinical practice
In (1), k is the number of stimulus alternatives, n is the total number of trials, nij is the cell entry in the ith row and jth column of the confusion matrix, ni is the sum of the entries in the ith row, nj is the sum of the entries in the jth column, and IT denotes information transfer
Summary
IN both human and veterinary medicine, health professionals use palpation as part of many clinical examinations. We decided to allow the participants to bring all their knowledge and experience (or lack thereof) to bear on stiffness identification In this regard, our study uses controlled (clinically relevant) stiffness levels, but does not control force output patterns (i.e., motor strategy). One previous study of stiffness perception used an absolute identification paradigm [22] It reports an information transfer of 1.46 bits over a stiffness range 0.2-3.0 N/mm for a group of college students and researchers with no clinical experience. This translates to the reliable identification of only two to three stiffness levels when stiffness is judged in isolation. The stiffness identification results, in terms of information transfer, were reported earlier in a preliminary form [1]
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