Outcomes of a Five-Year Formal Ophthalmology Residency Mentorship Program

Objective This article describes a formal ophthalmology residency mentorship program, identifies its strengths and weaknesses over 5 years of implementation, and proposes strategies to improve qualitative outcomes of the mentorship program.

Design Cross-sectional anonymous online survey.

Subjects All current and former mentees and mentors at the Casey Eye Institute (CEI) residency program from 2016 to 2021.

Methods All eligible participants were contacted via email to complete a survey to describe and analyze their experiences with the CEI's formal residency mentorship program.

Results Of the 65 surveyed participants, 82% preferred in-person meetings and met up from 2 to 3 times (44%) to 4 to 6 times (38.5%) annually at 15 minutes to 1 hour (48%) or 1 to 2 hours (42%) duration. Sixty-two percent of meetings were initiated by mentors, 8% by mentees, and 32% shared responsibilities equally. Participants also identified the three most important qualities for successful mentor-mentee relationship as personality (33.6%), communication styles (29.2%), and extracurricular interests/hobbies (16.8%). Mentees valued career advising, networking, and wellness support over academic and research mentorship. Subjective outcomes showed 25% of the mentee and 43% of the mentors agreed the mentorship program was a valuable experience. Comparably, 14% of the mentees and 38% of the mentors prioritized the relationship. There was a strong correlation between participants who prioritized the relationship and acknowledged it as a valuable experience (p < 0.01). Eighteen percent of the mentees and 43% of the mentors found the relationship effective and met their expectations. Twenty-one percent of the mentees and 38% of the mentors believed they had the tools and skills necessary to be effective in their respective roles.

Conclusion Our survey identified that weaknesses of the mentorship program include ineffective communications, inadequate preparation in their respective roles, and lack of priority focus on the relationship. We propose strategies to strengthen our program through creating workshops to clarify roles and responsibilities, emphasizing accountability with a contract statement, and implementing a new matching algorithm to customize participants' experience. Additional studies from other residencies with formal mentorship programs are warranted to identify, strategize, and foster high-quality mentorship.

Comparison of error rates between four pretrained DenseNet convolutional neural network models and 13 board-certified veterinary radiologists when evaluating 15 labels of canine thoracic radiographs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonly used as artificial intelligence (AI) tools for evaluating radiographs, but published studies testing their performance in veterinary patients are currently lacking. The purpose of this retrospective, secondary analysis, diagnostic accuracy study was to compare the error rates of four CNNs to the error rates of 13 veterinary radiologists for evaluating canine thoracic radiographs using an independent gold standard. Radiographs acquired at a referral institution were used to evaluate the four CNNs sharing a common architecture. Fifty radiographic studies were selected at random. The studies were evaluated independently by three board-certified veterinary radiologists for the presence or absence of 15 thoracic labels, thus creating the gold standard through the majority rule. The labels included "cardiovascular," "pulmonary," "pleural," "airway," and "other categories." The error rates for each of the CNNs and for 13 additional board-certified veterinary radiologists were calculated on those same studies. There was no statistical difference in the error rates among the four CNNs for the majority of the labels. However, the CNN's training method impacted the overall error rate for three of 15 labels. The veterinary radiologists had a statistically lower error rate than all four CNNs overall and for five labels (33%). There was only one label ("esophageal dilation") for which two CNNs were superior to the veterinary radiologists. Findings from the current study raise numerous questions that need to be addressed to further develop and standardize AI in the veterinary radiology environment and to optimize patient care.

Mentoring in radiology: An asset worth exploring!

Residents experience high pressure to be successful in both their career and in keeping up an optimal work-life balance. With a mentoring program, faculties can alleviate stress and provide help for their residents. It is now well established that mentor-mentee relationships during medical school, have influence in career decisions and professional identity formation. The same can be said for mentor-mentee relationships during radiology residency. In general, universal rules of mentoring are also useful and applicable in the field of radiology. These universal rules for establishing a successful mentoring relationship include creating a relationship of trust and confidentiality, clearly defining roles and responsibilities, establishing short- and long-term goals, using open and supportive communication, and collaboratively solving problems. The institutions and the radiology departments should be well prepared and aware of the responsibility to have trainees, providing time for mentors to dedicate to their academic duties. They have to implement strategies to effective mentor matching and orientation as well as the ability to provide evaluation with qualitative feedback. Periodic assessment should be warranted together with the incorporation of new technology as it plays a critical role in the training of millennial radiologists as they take the profession into a technology-laden future of medical imaging.

High enthusiasm about long lasting mentoring relationships and older mentors

BACKGROUND

Mentoring plays a pivotal role in workplace-based learning, especially in the medical realm. Organising a formal mentoring programme can be labor and time intensive and generally impractical in resource constrained medical schools with limited numbers of mentors. Hence, informal mentoring offers a valuable alternative, but will be more likely to be effective when mentors and protégés share similar views. It is therefore important to gain more insight into factors influencing perceptions of informal mentoring. This study aims to explore mentors and protégés' perceptions of informal mentoring and how these vary (or not) with gender, age and the duration of the relationship.

METHOD

We administered an Informal Mentor Role Instrument (IMRI) to medical practitioners and academics from Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire was developed for the study from other validated instruments. It contained 39 items grouped into 7 domains: acceptance, counselling, friendship, parenting, psychological support, role modelling and sociability.

RESULTS

A total of 103 mentors and 91 protégés completed the IMRI. Mentors had a better appreciation for the interpersonal aspects of informal mentoring than protégés, especially regarding acceptance, counselling and friendship. Moreover, being older and engaged in a longer mentoring relationship contributed to more positive perceptions of interpersonal aspects of mentoring, regardless of one's role (mentor or protégé).

CONCLUSION

It can be concluded that the expectations of mentors and protégés differed regarding the content and aim of the interpersonal characteristics of their mentoring relationship. We recommend mentors and protégés to more explicitly exchange their expectations of the informal mentoring relationship, as typically practiced in formal mentoring. Additionally, in our study, seniority and lasting relationships seem crucial for good informal mentoring. It appears beneficial to foster lasting informal mentoring relationships and to give more guidance to younger mentors.