Severance professor 1st Asia-Pacific surgeon to join C-SATS

Severance Hospital said Tuesday that Professor Min Byung-soh of the Colorectal Surgery Department recently joined the expert reviewer team of C-SATS, a global online service evaluating and managing surgical skills of surgeons.

Professor Min Byung-soh of the Colorectal Surgery Department at Severance Hospital became the first surgeon in the Asia-Pacific region to join the global expert reviewer group in C-SATS to evaluate and manage surgical skills.

Professor Min is the first surgeon from the Asia-Pacific region to participate in the team, providing analysis of surgeries registered in the C-SATS.

C-SATS, a cornerstone of Johnson and Johnson's digital solutions, is a cloud-based surgical data management platform that captures and saves images of minimally invasive surgery and provides assessments of technical skills to improve surgeons' surgical skills.

The platform allows surgeons to upload their surgical videos for unbiased assessment by expert surgeons and trained reviewers, and they can track performance and continuously refine their skills.

Various institutions, including Duke University, University of Washington, University of Michigan, and AdventHeaelth in the U.S., have adopted C-SATS, and more than 4,000 surgeons are using the service.

The research team led by Min conducted an exploratory evaluation to introduce C-SATS in the Asia-Pacific region.

Min's research team was evaluated based on international standards via C-SATS, and both laparoscopic and robotic surgery received the highest score in the colorectal field. Min became the first in the Asia-Pacific region to join the C-SATS expert review group to recognize his excellent surgical skills.

Previously, there were no objective and scientific measures to evaluate the quality of surgery. In clinical studies, experts assessed the quality of surgery through bleeding amount and operation time, indirect measurements without considering the surgical technique directly.

The medical society continued trying to improve the matter and eventually met a turning point when a paper was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013.

Experts reviewed surgeons' previously recorded surgical images and scored using a pre-established rating scale in the study. They found that a higher score resulted in lowered cases of postoperative complications compared with the actual performance of the operations.

"It is essential to develop surgical skills and objectively evaluate and manage the quality of operations to look back and analyze the shortcomings to build up surgical experiences," Min said. "Thanks to technological advancement, services evaluating and managing the quality of surgery will become common in near future and surgeons' skills will improve quickly by using platforms such as C-SATS, which will also enhance treatment outcome."