A review of participant recruitment transparency for sound validation of hip surgery simulators: a novel umbrella approach.

Malposition of implants is associated with complications, higher wear and increased revision rates in total hip replacement (THR) along with surgeon inexperience. Training THR residents to reach expert proficiency is affected by the high cost and resource limitations of traditional training techniques. Research in extended reality (XR) technologies can overcome such barriers. These offer a platform for learning, objective skill-monitoring and, potentially, for automated certification. Prior to their incorporation into curricula however, thorough validation must be undertaken. As validity is heavily dependent on the participants recruited, there is a need to review, scrutinise and define recruitment criteria in the absence of pre-defined standards, for sound simulator validation. A systematic review on PubMed and IEEE databases was conducted. Training simulator validation research in fracture, arthroscopy and arthroplasty relating to the hip was included. 46 validation studies were reviewed. It was observed that there was no uniformity in reporting or recruitment criteria, rendering cross-comparison challenging. This work developed Umbrella categories to help prioritise recruitment, and has formulated a detailed template of fields and guidelines for reporting criteria so that, in future, research may come to a consensus as to recruitment criteria for a hip "expert" or "novice".

Investigating the Effect of the Environment on Prey Detection Ability in Humans.

Visual search experiments used in the field of psychology may be applied to investigate the relationship between environments and prey detection rates that could influence hunting behaviours in ancient humans. Two lab-based experiments were designed to examine the effects of differing virtual environments, representing Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3) in Europe, on participants' ability to locate prey. The results show that prey detection performance is highly influenced by vegetation structure, both in terms of the biome type (wooded vs. grassland environments) and the density of the vegetation (trees in wooded and shrubs in grassland environments). However, the density of vegetation has a greater relative effect in grassland than in wooded biomes. Closer examination of the transition between biomes (relative percentages of trees vs. shrubs) at the same vegetative density shows a non-linear relationship between prey detection performance and the relative tree to shrub percentages. Changes in the distribution of biomes occurred throughout the Quaternary. The composition of those biomes will have likely affected hominin hunting behaviours because of their intermediary effects on prey detection performance. This may, therefore, have played a role in the turn-overs of hunter-gatherer hominin populations during MIS3 and at other times in the Quaternary.