A cross-disciplinary approach
Sweet explains that a successful simulation program requires expertise from three disciplines — medical science, cognitive science, and computer science — but it helps to include people who have cross-disciplinary experience as well. "Right now there are many engineers doing virtual reality who know nothing about medical applications, and surgical educators who know nothing about virtual reality. Everyone involved in this initiative needs to be facile with the two other fields. You want computer science engineers and surgical educators who know how to design and execute validation studies."
Jane Miller, Ph.D., says the University's new simulation center has a commitment to designing and building patient simulators based on each user's educational needs and applications.
Educational and instructional design will be key components of the simulation program. For instance, Sweet and his engineering colleagues might sit down with an ophthalmology professor who requests a simulator for cataract surgery. With the help of a cognitive scientist, the team would define the skill sets necessary to perform cataract surgery: cognitive, psychomotor, visual-spatial, and affective (which encompasses things like mood and concentration level).
"To be useful, the design of simulators must be driven by the curriculum designed by the subject matter — in this case, the ophthalmologist," notes Sweet. "And simulation doesn't take the place of didactic lectures or patient experience. It should augment those two."
There are many types of simulators used for medical training; however, interactive learning is the common thread. There are cognitive simulators that train in strictly cognitive skills such as learning and rehearsing the steps involved in a hernia operation. Simulators for basic skills teach things like the navigation skills necessary to do a procedure. Simulators for simple tasks might involve skin suturing, while simulators for complex tasks might involve stitching two open vessels together. And simulators such as the TURP simulator can be used to learn and practice a complete procedure.
Simulators can be composed of physical models, which may look and feel like real tissue, while virtual reality simulators involve navigating lifelike instruments in a computer-generated model. Some simulators are a combination of virtual and physical models.