Virtual Environments in training are a frequent topic of research, but an article in the Washington Post actually gets down to the detail of one in real use: Surgical Training at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
For example, the University of Maryland Medical Center has transformed an entire wing of its seventh floor into the Maryland Advanced Simulation, Training, Research and Innovation (MASTRI) Center, which officially opened at the end of 2006 and has been growing ever since. Every Tuesday, surgical residents meet for training in once-functional operating rooms converted into simulation labs. The trainees are presented an emergency scenario — say, a “patient” with a blocked airway — and must respond using either a virtual reality computer program or a hybrid that includes a mannequin simulator.
There is still lots of research to determine how best to integrate these patient simulators into surgical training, but it sounds like they’re making great strides. However, the article lost a little bit of credibility from me with this phrase on Page 2:
At Johns Hopkins, Gregory Hager, a computer science professor who researches medical devices, is using the da Vinci Surgical System — the only robot approved by the FDA to help perform minimally invasive surgery — to deconstruct surgical procedures into measurable components and imitable parts.
Now, in my previous life I worked for a medical robotics company (not the da Vinci, however) and I learned a few things:
- There are other robots for minimally invasive surgery.
- The FDA never ‘approves’ anything. They ‘clear’. It’s an important distinction, particularly in how the government assumes liability.
As the FDA is a government entity, it never “approves” anything because that would mean the government was endorsing a product (which they won’t do) and they would be liable if something went wrong (which they don’t want to be), so they just ‘clear’ it. It’s a fine point, but an important one.
Anyway, the article goes into some good detail about the concerns and successes of virtual patient training, should be worth reading.
via Playing doctor: Learning about slips of the knife better on ‘patients’ than patients.
