The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has revealed a collaboration with UK-based artificial intelligence (AI) specialist AiSolve, Bioflight VR, a Hollywood-based VFX specialist, and Oculus on a VR training system for emergency paediatric trauma situations.
The VR simulation aims to create a cost-effective, realistic and reliable training programme rather than using the traditional method of mannequins. These are normally quite expensive with the hospital spending around $430,000 USD annually to train staff on mannequins, it can also be very time-consuming.
So a team of programmers at AiSolve took a conceived medical environment and created an AI powered virtual world where students can make decisions and progress or re-evaluate their decisions based upon responses from the virtual patient, virtual medical staff and program. All the scenarios were developed from real case studies provided by the hospital’s doctors, fully realised in VR with multiple options, dialogue, possible events and a variety of events that may happen during a genuine paediatric emergency.
AiSolve CEO Devi Kolli said in a statement: “The aim of this is to prepare medical staff with the most realistic environment possible so that they experience the fast-moving, life-and-death, decision-making process multiple times and create strategies to make fast and accurate decisions for when children’s lives are in the balance. Through our collaboration with Oculus, Facebook and BioflightVR, we feel we’ve created the most realistic and immersive educational tool for healthcare providers that’s ever been developed.”
“On average we need one hour to prepare a 30 minute, mannequin-based simulation, and another 30 minutes to clean up,” according to Dr Todd Chang of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Our organisation pays around $430,000 annually to train staff on mannequins, despite it being very time consuming as it’s the only best simulated training solution up until now.”
Dr Chang continued: “Experimental learning is among the best way to practice paediatric emergencies. We had a rather aggressive timetable and the VR simulation literally improved week by week. VR allows for the first-time experiential learning where not all the people are in the same room at the same time. It is far more flexible and students can perform the training far more often.”
Beginning in early 2016 a fully-working model was delivered in early 2017 and the development and medical teams will continue to monitor and enhance the virtual world as more users learn with it.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of medical VR, reporting back with the latest advancements.