ICUC Remote Mentorship Project: The value of adequate intra-operative image documentation and interactive 3D colored models

Health care systems are very different from one country to another. The referral of patients to specialists can be difficult due to geographical reasons or due to scarce density of surgical professionals. Therefore, intra-operative supervision of young surgeons by experienced colleagues/mentors might not always be possible.
We present encouraging results of a remote mentorship concept, where in- presence mentoring was not possible and young surgeons were obliged to perform surgeries alone after receiving suggestions from an experienced mentor.
Interactive 3D colored models and access to exhaustive data of similar cases from large case series of the ICUC database have proven to be advantageous.
The results of 32 tibial plateau fractures treated by young surgeons with the described help of a remote mentor are encouraging.