Abstract:

The practical training in consulting and diagnosing a patient is essential for medical students. Any disruption of the normal practical training due to different reasons, such as the restrictions that were imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, will prevent students from gaining those essential skills. To answer this provocation, a web-based platform has been developed which can generate a virtual patient case and which allows speech and text-based interaction with the generated virtual patient. This enables medical students to reproduce a big part of their interaction with real-life patients, which usually takes place in hospitals. Students have access to the medical records of the virtual patient and to useful information about them. It allows medical students to perform an objective exam and to request, visualize and analyse different health investigations, as well as to elaborate a treatment plan and to provide presumptive, differential and final diagnoses. In addition, the platform allows professors to assist their students in real time during the interaction with the patient, or to evaluate their performances after the end of the sessions. The platform runs an engine that generates clinically valid patient cases. It scores each evolution of the students and stores a detailed report about each session in the profile of the student and in the profile(s) of his/her professor(s). The platform supports Romanian and English languages with the possibility to add new languages. The scenarios that are developed for the current state of the platform cover the symptoms associated with four acute and chronic heart diseases: pulmonary thromboembolism, acute coronary syndromes, moderate or severe mitral regurgitation, and severe aortic stenosis. Further extensions that cover other heart-related diseases and other diseases in general are envisaged.

Keywords:

e-learning, Educational Software, Education in Medical Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Web Interfaces, Simulation Engine.