This study reports the educational evaluation of surgical videos of ThuLEP on YouTube on October 31, 2020. These videos were available on Youtube for a mean of 3.1 years and were watched by worldwide trainees, residents or any beginners. Considering these videos have the potential educational value and enormous influence, a quality assessment of these videos may be essential and reasonable for trainees. To our knowledge, this is the first quality assessment for YouTube surgical videos of ThuLEP. Meanwhile, we firstly reported the evaluation checklist for an educational video of ThuLEP.
Watching videos is a good method for surgical learning, especially for learning of minimal invasive endoscopic surgeries. Some studies have revealed that YouTube is the most frequently used video source for surgical learning and preparation [3, 4, 12]. However, without the peer review and quality assessment, some studies have revealed that YouTube is not a reliable education or information resource [13–16]. This reminds us that the quality assessment of surgical videos is necessary when we use them as the educational tool.
In laparoscopic surgical education, LAP-VEGaS is a good example for producing an educational video with logical structure [10, 15]. These guidelines can improve the educational value of surgical videos. So, we assume that the similar requirement for reporting educational videos of urological endoscopic surgeries is also useful. Although there is no a published evaluation checklist for ThuLEP videos, we invited two experienced surgeons to create an initial vision of this checklist (Table 1).
In our study, we found that the most popular videos didn’t have the highest educational value. In contrast, the highest valued videos were not the most popular videos. The correlative analysis proved that educational score of the videos had no correlation with the number of views. It’s an interesting phenomenon which is in accordance with other studies [3, 13, 17–19].
We have noted that many urological journals have video section which encourage authors to submit videos. Very few journals are open access. Most of them are not free. There were two videos of ThuLEP surgery published in Videourology which were made by some experts in this filed [20, 21]. Only after buying them we can see the videos. We also found that one of the reviewed videos had been published in Urology Video Journal which is an open access journal [22]. The European Association of Urology and the American Urological Association both have the video libraries. But they are only open for registered members or eligible learners.
There are some inevitable limitations in this study. We only evaluated the ThuLEP videos on YouTube platform, since it has been the most frequently used educational video source for residents and trainees. We only search the videos with English language. No doubt the selective bias exists. Because the authors may upload their videos with non-English language, and the YouTube is an open platform, the new videos will be uploaded and the old videos may be removed. Meanwhile, there is still no a generally accepted consensus for reporting an educational video about ThuLEP. The checklist that we created must be approved by more experts. Although YouTube is public and non-academic video platform, more requirement for uploading surgical videos may improve its educational value.