UTILIZING VIRTUAL REALITY IN TEACHING AND TRAINING: PROGRESS TOWARD VIRTUAL SURGICAL SIMULATIONS

Technological advances, such as online courses and virtual simulations, are altering how we teach and learn. Online courses are becoming more common. These courses give professors a unique forum to engage students from around the world, and enable students to view and review lecture material multiple times. As an added bonus, pre-recording lecture material frees faculty time, enables increasing class size, and allows faculty to devote more energy toward productive group interactive curriculum.

Online courses are ideally suited for many types of lecture-based curricula; however, they are not sufficient for curriculums that necessitate hands-on activities such as gross anatomy and surgery. We are currently working to rectify this conundrum by creating high-resolution simulations in the virtual world. Our goal is to utilize virtual environments to simulate visual and haptic scenarios necessary for hands-on activities. We are working to create realistic virtual surgeries that accurately portray the multivariate aspects of a “live” surgery. This work will advance current technologies by: creating realistic visualizations of surgery, programming surgical complications that can be incorporated into a surgical session or manipulated by an external viewer, create animations of the anatomy and the ability of the surgeon to manually manipulate different anatomical structures, and advance current haptic functions of virtual environments so that the surgeon has a full sensory experience (they can see, hear, feel, and experience a realistic surgical procedure).

Simulations have been used extensively by commercial pilots and the military for training exercises. These simulations have been shown to dramatically increase both cognitive and motor accuracy of the participant. We anticipate that virtual classrooms with virtual simulations (hands-on activities) will have similar outcomes. Current endeavors and progress toward these goals in virtual reality environments by both our group and others throughout the world will be discussed.