Abstract
We read with great interest the article by Brown et al, 1 “Development of a Surgical Video Atlas for Resident Education: 3-Year Experience.” In this article, the authors present their excellent work collaborating with the Journal of Medical Insight (JOMI) to produce 29 otolaryngology surgical videos to aid in surgical education. We agree that high-quality instructional surgical videos enhance trainees’ development, accelerate surgical skill acquisition, and provide a needed supplement to operative experience in a time when operative volumes and trainee surgical involvement may be altered by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.2,3 Illustrating the heightened need for asynchronous learning platforms, other recent publications have highlighted surgical atlas videos, podcasts, recorded lectures, and readings in a proposed COVID-19 era otolaryngology medical student curriculum.4,5
Our group has also developed a high-resolution surgical video atlas titled the Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgical Video Atlas. 6 Our video series currently contains 78 videos with 12 of 14 key indicator cases represented and 3 to 5 videos added each month. Our group has made several strategic decisions during development of our surgical atlas, which we feel are worth sharing and may inform future innovators in this arena. We have maintained the preproduction, filming, narration, postproduction, and publication activities within our group. We have found that this approach has educational value for the residents involved in the conception, development, and editing of the surgical videos. This also gives us freedom to keep our series freely available via open-access websites, including YouTube.com 7 and Headmirror.com. 6 This approach allows anyone with a reliable Internet connection the ability to access video surgical education from anywhere in the world. Second, video narration is conducted in the postproduction phase rather than intraoperatively to ensure high audio quality without background noise, provide ample preparation time for the surgeon, and obviate the need for multitasking on the part of the senior surgeon. This also allows for production of concise and streamlined videos that focus on key surgical steps.
We congratulate the authors on their contributions and excellent work developing a high-quality product, and we look forward to seeing other innovative ways that clinicians incorporate intraoperative video resources into surgical training, particularly during this time when supplemental educational content is vital.