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Introduction
When performed by a skilled practitioner, abdominal palpation in the companion animal can yield information, including the presence of abdominal distension resulting from excess fluid or fat, muscle laxity or organomegaly; the presence of space-occupying lesions such as an intra-abdominal mass; detect pain that may indicate an acute abdomen and contribute to the decision to pursue additional diagnostic testing such as imaging of the abdomen ( Ettinger and Feldman 2005 ). Abdominal palpation has been described as "an art that is not replicated by more sophisticated, expensive, or complicated tests" ( Ettinger and Feldman 2005 , p.7), rendering it a fundamental part of veterinary education. However, abdominal palpation is a challenging skill to learn because it requires good manual dexterity, the appropriate application of digital pressure, the ability to estimate the size of a structure without visualising it, the conversion of tactile information into a mental image and the merging of tactile information with knowledge of normal anatomy ( Esteves and Spence 2014 ). Although instructors can verbally assist students learning palpation by narrating the experience, only the student can determine whether he or she is palpating the structure the instructor is describing, a difficult situation because novices have a limited ability to self-assess ( Kruger and Dunning 1999 , Hodges and others 2001 ). Further, learning to perform abdominal palpation requires repetitive practice to develop an understanding of normal findings and begin to recognise abnormal findings. Animals may not tolerate multiple palpations, limiting students' ability to gain practice, especially in more fractious species such as the cat.
Veterinary educators have identified a need for a small animal abdominal palpation simulator to address these challenges, and two simulators have been described in the literature to date ( Bunch 1999 , Parkes and others 2009 ). While these models represent a major advances in teaching students how to perform abdominal palpation, neither contains all of the typically palpable abdominal organs and both only represent a normal palpation This study sought to create a low-fidelity feline abdominal palpation model that portrayed a variety of normal and abnormal conditions to allow students to practise palpation at their own pace in a standardised environment before proceeding to the live animal. In contrast to high-fidelity models which resemble a...