Clinical Simulation Training in Virtual Reality

Overview

During the summer of 2022, I had the wonderful opportunity to work on a project involving creating Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) Applications for the purpose of simulating certain surgical scenarios. This project, an ongoing effort of University of Pennsylvania doctors Dr. Kristoffel Dumon and Dr. William Yi, was inspired by the lack of online/virtual training tools that doctors across the country had access to, especially during the era of COVID 19.

Built on Unity 3D, the applications that we assisted in developing were designed to be IVR game-like environments where hospital staff can play a didactic surgical simulation of the operation that they needed to learn. Due to the small size of our team, all of us interchangeably worked on different portions of different scenarios, but I personally felt as if I developed the most in the Pneumothorax scenario's tutorial scene, where I designed the UI components as well as coded in many of the user friendly components of the walkthrough on how to use VR headsets.

To read more about the project, please refer to the presentation poster detailing the project, what it is about, and its experimental effect on residents who have used the software.

Some photos of the Pneumothorax Simulation