Towards Virtual Teaching Hospitals for Advanced Surgical Training

Existing virtual training environments in medicine usually focus only on the training of a specific medical skill and are conducted in a single virtual room. However, medical challenges are often in the context of the planning procedure and operating room intervention. Therefore, it is crucial to provide a training environment that tackles these issues. In this paper, we present a prototype of surgical department within a virtual teaching hospital. It supports multiple users, photo-realistic avatars, and training scenarios ranging from planning procedures to laparoscopic surgery in the virtual operating room. Medical data for each virtual patient is synchronized across the different rooms, allowing users to view, analyze and train on key decision points from diagnosis to surgical incision for each patient. The environment was evaluated in a pilot study with five surgical residents and one medical student. The experts assessed the environment as an essential tool to evaluate and improve surgical planning as well as the training during critical situations of the surgical procedures. We conclude that the development of the virtual teaching hospital components described here has the potential to be a basis for future generations of medical training simulators.