Early Exposure to Neurovascular Neurosurgery in Medical School Boosts Interest in the Field and Improves Grasp on Fundamentals

Introduction: As endovascular neurosurgery techniques continue to evolve year-to-year and month-to-month, medical school curricula are hardly expected to keep up with this ever-evolving field. As a result, medical students in the United States have wildly varying exposures to the field, particularly with respect to opportunities for hands-on educational experiences. Current curricula need to be complemented with a powerful and adaptive course on neurovascular neurosurgery.

Methods: We launched a yearly hands-on neurovascular neurosurgery course for medical students and residents. The course runs the entire day and is a combination of lectures focused on neurovascular disease and management accompanied by hands-on sessions. During the interactive sessions, all students have an opportunity to learn fundamental microsurgery and angiography techniques using real microscopes and angiography simulators. We surveyed the students before and after each of the two courses. This year’s post-survey included quiz questions the students had not previously seen.

Results: Over two courses, we had 149 attendees, 71.8% of which were first and second-year medical students. Fifteen institutions were represented including Harvard Medical School and affiliated hospitals, Tufts, Boston University, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown. The average survey completion rate was 41.4% for the four surveys across the two courses. Attendees’ interest in pursuing a surgical specialty (t= 1.815, p=0.039) along with their comfort with neuroanatomy (t= 8.780, p= < 0.001) and neurosurgical disease (t= 6.133, p= < 0.001) was significantly elevated after the completion of this year’s course. Responses to the post-survey showed a good grasp of the fundamentals with 68% of attendees answering 70% of the quiz questions correctly. The feedback responses in the surveys were almost entirely positive with the few constructive comments being limited to requests for more opportunities to chat with other attendees and faculty throughout the day. Overall, attendees reported high levels of satisfaction with the courses.

Conclusion : An up-to-date and interactive course on neurovascular neurosurgery may be an effective vehicle to provide medical students with exposure to the field and the opportunity to learn the fundamentals.