A Virtual Environment for Training and Assessment of Surgical Teams Paulo Vinícius F. Paiva¹, Liliane S. Machado² LabTEVE Federal University of Paraíba João Pessoa/PB, Brazil ¹paulovfppiox@gmail.com, ²liliane@di.ufpb.br Ana Maria Gondim Valença Department of Social and Clinical Dentistry. Federal University of Paraíba João Pessoa/PB, Brazil anaval@terra.com.br Abstract— Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can improve the way remote users interact with one another while learning and training skills on a given task. One CVE’s possibility to the health area is the simulation of medical procedures in which a group of remote users can train and interact simultaneously. Health area has been benefited from the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) especially in education area, where these systems present some advantages over traditional teaching methods such as: cost reduction for training, reducing the use of guinea pigs and anatomical specimens in laboratory practices as well the use of interactive teaching approaches. Another VR’s feature is the ability to monitor user’s actions for assessing training performance. Thus, statistical models are used in order to check whether a group performed the procedure correctly or not. The goal is to allow the formation of teams and the development of individual skills to work together. This work proposes and discusses one CVE’s architecture for supporting training and assessment of team skills, during surgery simulation. Keywords- collaborative virtual environments; surgery simulation; skills assessment; distance education I. INTRODUCTION Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are Virtual Reality (VR) applications in which a group of users interact with one another over a computer network, in real-time, in order to perform a given task, collaboratively [5, 40, 26, 4]. In such systems, remote users exploit deeper levels of realism while they perceive remote user’s actions, such as if they were sharing the same space on the real world. Thus, Collaboration is a well known concept in VR and has applications in many areas such as collaborative design and software engineering, medical applications (e.g. tele- surgery) and distance learning [26]. The CVEs makes possible the collaboration between students and professionals (located in different geographic locations) which can help each other to improve the quality of learning in different practices and disciplines. Another CVE’s advantage is the possibility of providing Distance Learning (DL), helping some regions devoid of health specialists or technological resources for practical training. In health education, for example, these systems present some advantages over traditional teaching methods while brings the possibility of cost reduction in training programs, the disuse of guinea pigs and cadaveric anatomical parts during laboratory practices, and the use of more interactive teaching methods. The VR increases user’s interaction while it occurs in more intuitive approach through the use of especial interaction devices. One example is the haptic devices which enable users to identify textures and material properties (e.g. hardness and elasticity) of virtual objects such as human organs and tissues. Haptic devices explore the tactile sensation of users and can simulate the use of needles or scalpels used in procedures such as blood collection, cut, suture and minimally invasive surgeries [18, 26]. VR systems also offers the possibility of professionals to watch 3D models within human body and organs, to learn to deal with real situations that often occur in clinical operations, or even with critical and unexpected situations as well as to practice risk interventions in virtual human body [36]. Thus, many kinds of VR applications have been developed as technological support to health practices, not only inside education area. Nowadays, VR applications are also used for supporting surgery planning, neuropsychological assessment and rehabilitation of patients with phobic disorders, distance diagnostics, composition of new drugs, visualization and simulation of virtual patients and virtual human physiologies, among other possibilities. Another feature presented by VR systems is the ability to monitor the actions undertaken in order to investigate and assess the performance of users’ training in Virtual Environments (VEs), enabling the reporting of its performance and levels of knowledge [23]. Thus, user’s assessment is important for educational purposes in which is indispensable the feedback of user’s actions. Thus, different methods for user’s evaluation have been used in VEs, from simplest ones such as the use of questionnaires, video tapes observation, to the most complex approaches, as the use of statistical methods and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques which classify student’s performance training. In the second case, statistical methods are implemented in assessment systems that run simultaneously to the VR simulator. This work has as main objective to propose and discuss a CVE’s architecture devoted to support training of surgical teams, providing the feature of assessment of team members through the use of an expert system based on fuzzy logic. Firstly, some fundamental concepts are discussed, and then it presents the results of a literature review on computational applications in support of health area and finally it presents 2013 XV Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality 978-0-7695-5001-5/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SVR.2013.22 17