Asynchronous teaching of psychomotor skills through VR annotations: evaluation in digital rectal examination.

Many VR technology based training systems use expert's motion data as the training aid, but would not provide any short-cut to teaching medical skills that do not depend on exact motions. Earlier we presented Annotated Simulation Records (ASRs), which can be used to encapsulate experts' insight on psychomotor skills. Annotations made to behavioural parameters in training simulators enable asynchronous teaching instead of just motion training in a proactive way to the learner. We evaluated ASRs for asynchronous teaching of Digital Rectal Examination (DRE) with 3 urologists and 8 medical students. The ASRs were found more effective than motion-based training with verbal feedback.

A novel approach for training of surgical procedures based on visualization and annotation of behavioural parameters in simulators.

Recording performance during training sessions on simulators is becoming a new standard for assessment of surgical skills and thus a significant part of training. Typical simulator-based training can be assessed using criteria that cover the whole procedure to make distinction between skill levels. Studies so far have rarely addressed the challenge of how to provide better feedback about the user's performance on a surgical simulator. Our approach for surgical training is Annotated Simulation Records (ASRs) and visualization of behavioural parameters of interaction in surgery. This paper briefly outlines a framework for building user-defined skill models and presents initial results. We demonstrate the ASR-based approach in force exertion tasks on elastic objects by utilizing a cardiovascular surgeon's recorded interaction on an aorta palpation simulator.