My project this summer was on creating an immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment for surgical simulations to compare how effective they are to traditional methods of teaching simulation surgery. Using an IVR application setup would potentially adjust to a futuristic standard of learning in which the same information can be communicated through a virtual environment based on interaction with the subject matter rather than traditional didactics and lecture. We figured that IVR methods for teaching simulation surgery would be effective since there is much more interaction based learning that can occur for surgical training. This method would be especially beneficial for incoming residents and medical students, as they have more room to explore procedures to gain more experience. 

Our team built the IVR scenario in Unity 3D, a game development engine. We chose to recreate the pneumothorax scenario as an interaction-based step-by-step tutorial style game complete with knowledge points that the user can interact with to learn about each step in the procedure. In our scene, we also chose to focus on the user interface to make usability easier, including adding a short tutorial scene to teach the user about using the VR headset and how to use its controls. We then would test our application at the University of Pennsylvania SIM Center with 48 first year residents who were split into two groups. One group learned the pneumothorax procedure through the IVR application, and the other learned through traditional lecture means. Before and after the learning was concluded, we had each of the 48 residents take a pretest and a post test, and we would use the difference in scores to measure how much knowledge each person obtained through either method of learning. 

The results we received were that the residents that used the IVR method did in fact exhibit a higher increase in score than their counterparts who took the lecture. Although both groups had similar scores for the pretest, the change in score for the experimental IVR group was greater than that of the control group.

From this study, our group saw that IVR applications were indeed as effective as traditional means of communicating the same information regarding a surgical procedure. Our next steps after conducting this study would hence be making more scenarios of a similar type, which we are currently working on now. In the future, we can also see these types of scenarios being compiled together in some sort of virtual cloud library of IVR training simulations for the public to access to make training more accessible by many more individuals. Some limitations, however, would be trying to solve the issue of motion sickness that comes up when people use the headsets. We have tried to remedy that by making our scenes more beginner-friendly