Procedural medical training in VR in a smart virtual university hospital

Abstract

A smart virtual university hospital representing a real-life one, can prepare students for direct patient contact and provide possibilities for clinical practice. Such a virtual hospital will support student learning by providing adaptive and flexible solutions for practicing a variety of clinical situations at the students’ own pace. This paper builds on a previous research on the Smart Virtual University concept and explores the possibilities for medical procedural training with Virtual Reality. A scenario focusing on pre-operative neurosurgical procedural training was developed and tested. The procedural training has been enhanced with real world medical data (MRI and ultrasound). The feedbacks from the tests have been generally positive, both in terms of general user experience and expected learning outcomes. The paper presents the implementation procedure, evaluation results and outlines the directions for future work.