Qualitative Evaluation of Faults (Mathematical Incorrectness) in Anatomical Model for Regional Anaesthesia Simulator Elena Zaitseva, Miroslav Kvassay, Vitaly Levashenko Department of Informatics University of Zilina Zilina, Slovakia {elena.zaitseva, miroslav.kvassay, vitaly.levashenko}@fri.uniza.sk Thomas M. Deserno Department of Medical Informatics Uniklinik RWTH Aachen Aachen, Germany deserno@ieee.org Victor Voski Department of Anaesthesiology University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Germany vvoski@ukaachen.de Andreas Herrler Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences Maastricht University Maastricht, The Netherlands a.herrler@maastrichtuniversity.nl Abstract—Regional Anaesthesia (RA) is a rapidly growing field, which appears to be a great challenge for novices in terms of learning a new technique. Although many training methods are available, they do not provide a sufficient training that gives novices an opportunity to gain all skills required to perform RA safely. New prototypes of RA simulator have been developed under project RASimAs (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant). The RASimAs prototypes are based on a Virtual Physiological Human model that includes anatomy, physics and biological functions. One of the possible ways to develop this model is based on the use of existing 3D anatomical models (e.g., ZygoteBody, Anatomium3D Anatomy Model). The model for RA simulator is inducted based on some physiological layers that are indicated in these 3D models separately. This indicates existence of intersections between different layers, what is not good for development of RA simulator. Therefore, intersections between different layers of Zygote Male Human Anatomy Collection v.4.0 (a part of ZygoteBody) are considered and investigated in this paper. Keywords—regional anaesthesia simulator, anatomical model, error, incorrectness, RASimAs I. INTRODUCTION The principal goal of use of information technologies in medicine is improvement of health care. This application provides a new concept of Health Information Technology (HIT) that supposes use of computer hardware and software that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and use of health care data, information, and knowledge for communication and decision- making [1]. The HIT is composed of computers and communications attributes that are combined together to build systems for health monitoring and diagnosis, medical treatment, and patient care. Application of such system allows decreasing medical error and increasing level of patient care. An important part or component of this system is medical personnel. Because of that, the development of a high-reliable healthcare system has to be implemented in conjunction with creation of background for rise of qualification level of medical staff. Inadequate technical skills resulted from limited training methods are one of the most difficult challenges faced by trainees today. Current teaching methods have failed to provide the sufficient training for young medical specialists. They include simple phantoms, cadavers, video teaching and, if it is possible, training on human volunteers or colleagues. These methods have limited capabilities and, therefore, development of new training methods is a current issue. A possible way to solve these limitations is application of computer-based simulator. The important part of any medical simulator is a virtual 3D anatomical model [2–4]. Virtual Environment (VE) is used for different purposes in medicine and healthcare [5], and it intends to provide a balance between engagement and aspects of learning using the simulator. VE can allow a wider range of content and the enhanced learning through the different subjects and learning methodologies [3, 4]. Typically, medical simulators are developed based on a Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) 3D model. This implies that reliability of a simulator depends on the quality of the used VPH model. As a rule, model’s quality and simulator’s reliability are evaluated in step of testing after designing the simulator. Reliability analysis of a system in design is a complex and unformalized problem. This problem is caused by a lot of specifics of the elaborated system (in particular, the medical simulator). In this paper, we consider the preliminary reliability evaluation of the simulator for Regional Anaesthesia (RA) in the step of design. This simulator has been developed under the project RASimAs (Regional Anaesthesia Simulator and Assistant) [5, 6]. The evaluation is implemented by qualitative analysis of the designed VPH model. This analysis allows us to obtain basic statistics about possible inconsistencies. These inconsistencies are interpreted as initial faults of the model, which can cause failure and unacceptable functioning of the simulator. This work has been supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 610425. TheInternationalConferenceonInformationandDigitalTechnologies2016 978-1-4673-8861-0/16/$31.00©2016IEEE 311