11-year Anniversary!

The Toronto Video Atlas of Surgery (TVASurg) launched its first video 11 years ago in November of 2011. For this month’s blog we’d like to report on the past decade of generating well over 100 3D animation-enhanced surgical teaching videos! Let’s begin with some big numbers on our activities and production.

When TVASurg started, we were focused on general surgery, hepato-pancreatico-biliary, and multi-organ transplant surgeries. Our site was one of many housed within the Perioperative Interactive Education (PIE) library of medical educational websites. Since then, our site has evolved into an independent entity with multiple chapters covering several surgical disciplines. We’ve also shared and posted on several major social media platforms, built a catered library of our videos on YouTube, and experimented with new technologies for teaching surgery.

We launched the Atlas in 2011 with 3 cases, each beginning their own respective chapters: HPB, Transplant, and Surgical Techniques. Today, the HPB chapter has grown to 57 videos, and we have published 13 videos on multi-organ transplantation. 2013 marked the year when we started producing animation-enhanced laparoscopic teaching videos.

A significant milestone for us occurred in November of 2014 when we decided to take on the challenge of posting a new video or interactive project to our site on a monthly basis. We also started our ongoing Virtual Reality experiments, as well as bolstering our presence on various social media platforms.

In 2018 we began to expand, adding Obstetrics and Gynaecology chapters to our library. In 2020 we launched the Head and Neck chapter, highlighting flap harvest surgeries. Our most recent addition was our Gynacologic Oncology chapter this past summer, with new chapters in the works!

Preparing the data for this blog gave us an opportunity to go over 11 years worth of projects and see the growth of our production capabilities. To date we have produced over 9 continuous play  hours of animation content. For most of our videos we use 3D animation to give an overview of the surgical planning, but we also use 2D and 3D overlays to highlight important steps of a procedure, and in a few cases we’ve made videos that were entirely animated. 

In the stacked bar chart below, we’ve compiled data from the majority of our monthly releases, focusing on the runtime of surgical teaching videos in minutes, and how much of each video consists of clinical footage (red) vs animation content (blue). For the purposes of this chart, we’ve omitted tutorials, interactive sites, and blog videos, and we’re representing the data as averages for each year for the sake of clarity.

By isolating the annual average animation content percentage of each video, we can see an increase in the overall amount of animation content that makes up each of our videos.

If we instead isolate the footage content of each video, we see that even though our animation percentage of each video is increasing, video footage still makes up a significant portion of our educational videos, as is our intent with the atlas.

From its inception, TVASurg was always intended to be an open-access resource for a global audience of healthcare practitioners. Analytics from our site traffic and YouTube channel assure us that we have achieved this objective. We have also established new collaborations with leading surgical experts from different countries on multiple continents, and look forward to continuing this trend.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of our progress and accomplishments over the past decade. When we started this atlas, we had no idea how much it would grow and expand, and we are happy to find our content has been so well-received. TVASurg will continue our mission to provide high-quality surgical education videos with effective visualisations. While we don’t yet know what the future will bring, we look forward to exciting new opportunities and fruitful collaborations that can help raise the bar in surgical education across the globe, and ultimately, make a meaningful contribution to improving patient surgical outcomes everywhere.

All the best, and thank you so much for your continued support.

–TVASurg Team