Medical proctoring is an objective assessment of a practitioner’s clinical competence by a ‘proctor’ or a ‘supervisor’ belonging to the medical staff. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) defines proctoring as an objective evaluation of a physician’s clinical competence by a proctor who represents and is responsible for, the medical staff. AAFP categorizes proctoring into prospective, concurrent, and retrospective.

In medical specialty, this technique is often used to evaluate the clinical competence of new medical staff members seeking privileges and existing medical staff members requesting new or expanded privileges.

Telesurgery

In the present scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic, artificial intelligence is changing medical proctoring. Remote medical proctoring is now being used to monitor surgeons in the operating room to provide case support. This has proven helpful in situations where the proctor can’t be present physically, such as limited access to hospital or travel restrictions.

ExplORer Surgical is a company that offers a digital platform for case support during surgery. In case the medical device specialist feels the need to mark-up a surgical area for on-screen guidance, ExplORer offers an augmented reality technology with a virtual laser pointer for this purpose.

AI has made medical proctoring available in real-time wherein the medical proctors can guide the surgeons by sharing instructions and warnings onto the operator’s screen to monitor the surgeon throughout the procedure. Computer vision can be used to collect data on the surgical procedures and feed it automatically into a surgeon’s workflow.

Collaborating Virtually

Proximie is a startup that facilitates multicentric virtual interaction of collaborators from distant locations. This helps physicians and surgeons to have to interact similar to the ones they have during surgeries. This platform makes it possible to interact and demonstrate various surgical procedures in real-time utilizing the techniques of augmented reality, AI, and ML. A real sense of teamwork is achieved through this virtual interaction in a live procedure or assessment from start to finish, in a visually and intuitive way.

Tele-mentoring

Recent advances in robotic surgery highlight the applicability of telementoring using AI. With the advent of minimally invasive surgical procedures, AI-enabled surgical proctoring is becoming a viable option instead of traditional on-site surgical proctoring. Often surgeons who are new to MIS need to be guided and mentored by more experienced surgeons. In such cases, telementoring allows access to intraoperative guidance through video images. Intraoperative guidance via telecommunication networks can be offered onto a remote work-site.

Augmented Reality

During this pandemic, a lot of medical students have missed regular training on patients with hands-on experience. To get exposure to medical cases, AI-enabled learning with the help of augmented reality through Livestream and video access offers the trainees an excellent learning experience and a chance to interact with their faculty during the session. During the Livestream of the procedure, the medical students get to operate the surgical field, based on what they view on the screen in the OR and the opportunity to engage with supervisors who are in a remote location.

AI-enabled Medical exam proctoring

COVID-19 has forced medical students to take up e-learning and give exams online from their homes. To invigilate these exams and to check for malpractice, AI-based remote proctoring technologies are being used. Remote proctoring helps educators make sure that the students don’t engage in unfair practices in the absence of a physical invigilator.

AI-based online proctoring uses the student’s web camera to monitor and record the student and his surrounding using video and activities on the desktop screens, including chats and messages exchanged during the exam. Besides this, online proctoring allows the proctor to verify the exam candidate’s identity from a remote destination.

Proctortrack, Examroom.Ai, OnVue, and ProctorU are few online proctoring startups that detect and prevent cheating and malpractices during a remote examination. Detection of identity fraud, analysis of cheating behaviour, and discovering content theft are the three major areas that AI-enabled remote proctoring focuses on. This is developed by training the machine with extensive data of recognition of pattern, face and voice, and changes in eye, plane, and mouth movement.

Talview is a powerful proctoring tech that is highly scalable and cost-efficient. It ensures high quality and non-intrusive design for a secure candidate experience during the examination. AI facial recognition, copy/paste blocking, 360° test environment check, browser freezing, and question paper watermarking are among the top features offered by this startup.

Future Perspective

AI and machine learning are already revolutionizing the healthcare sector. Medical proctoring will be more impactful when more and more video datasets can be fed to the machine. Soon the practice of using videos will be a standard procedure in hospitals and operating rooms. Image-object recognition and machine learning in medical proctoring will help to the scenario in the operation room even for the minutest details such as the time taken by the surgeon in completing a particular procedure.

Medical proctoring and telementoring’s many advantages include the continuing guidance, delivery of expertise, and maximization of healthcare resources. Incorporation of Ai and AR into routine clinical practice can ensure the best treatment for the patient.

AI-enabled online exam proctoring is evolving as a successful practice to conduct remote exams fairly. But the automated program needs to be trained to ignore standard practices and behaviours like natural eye movements and to talk to one-self in stressful situations like an examination.

This new wave of AI-enabled medical proctoring has enhanced the clinician’s remote outreach while maintaining social distancing. This has also improved the quality of teaching and learning in the medical field as supervisors assess the clinical competency of the practicians and at the same time, disseminate medical knowledge regarding new trends in medicine and surgical procedures to the medical students and trainees from a distant location.