Thoracoscopic surgical procedure in progress

PROFICIENCY-BASED VATS TRAINING

Master VATS skills through deliberate practice.

Structured exercises, criterion-referenced assessment, and expert feedback guide progress from fundamental skills toward proficiency.

How it works

Practice. Record. Assess. Improve.

Every session has a defined purpose, observable criteria, and a clear next step.

01

Practice

Train one defined technical skill.

02

Record

Capture a standardised performance.

03

Expert Review

Get objective assessment and expert feedback.

04

Improve

Use feedback to focus the next session.

Assessment & feedback

Know exactly what to improve next.

Surgical Deliberate Practice Assessment (sDPA) uses predefined, exercise-specific criteria to make technical feedback concrete and actionable.

Train independently. Expert assessment and structured feedback are delivered asynchronously as structured PDF or video reports.

Criterion-referenced VATS assessment with trainee, reference, and scoring criteria
01 Criterion-referenced assessment

AI-supported training

Turn feedback into focused practice.

Experts review your recorded exercises with support from AI Assessment.

Ask AI Mentor about your feedback and plan what to practise next.

VATS practice recording with tracked instrument position and a target map
01 Expert assessment with AI support
AI Mentor explaining an assessment and suggesting what to practise next
02 AI Mentor

Longitudinal progress

See your progress. Train to proficiency.

Follow performance across sessions, identify persistent weaknesses, and progress toward a predefined proficiency benchmark rather than a fixed number of repetitions.

Example trainee learning trajectory

Evidence-Based Foundations

Built on deliberate practice. Informed by evidence.

learnVATS combines focused repetition, criterion-referenced assessment, structured feedback, and longitudinal progress tracking within a proficiency-based training approach.
  • Deliberate practice

    Ericsson et al.

    Psychological Review, 1993

    View study
  • Proficiency-based training

    Gallagher et al.

    Annals of Surgery, 2005

    View study
  • Surgical deliberate practice

    Wickramasinghe & Vincent

    BMC Medical Education, 2025

    View review