An observational, prospective study to evaluate the preoperative planning tool "CI-Wizard" for cochlear implant surgery

"CI-Wizard" is a new, three-dimensional software planning tool for cochlear implant surgery with manual and semi-automatic algorithms to visualize anatomical risk structures of the lateral skull base preoperatively. Primary endpoints of the study represented the evaluation of the CI-Wizards usability, accuracy, subjectively perceived and objectively measured time in clinical practice. In a period from January 2014 to March 2015, n = 36 participants were included in this study. These members were divided into three groups of equal number (n = 12), but different level of experience. Senior doctors and consultants (group 1), residents (group 2) and medical students (group 3) segmented 12 different CT-scan data sets of the CI-Wizard (four per participant). In total, n = 144 data sets were collected. The usability of the CI-Wizard was measured by the given questionnaire with an interval rating scale. The Jaccard coefficient (JT) was used to evaluate the accuracy of the anatomical structures segmented.