Elsevier

Computers & Graphics

Volume 29, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 283-288
Computers & Graphics

Virtual learning environment for medical education based on VRML and VTK

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2004.12.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is being applied to a wide range of medical areas, including medical education/training, surgery and diagnostics assistance. In the medical education field, VR opens new realms in the teaching of medicine and creates new effective learning procedures for the students. In contrast with the expensive immersive virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) such as CAVE, ImmersaDesk, virtual reality modeling language (VRML) technology provides a cheap and simple way to create such an environment and can be easily deployed in the classroom. In this paper, we describe some traditional application of VR in medical education and design a prototype of VRLE system based on VRML and visualization toolkit (VTK). The system architecture and module design are described in detail and some results are presented.

Introduction

Modern medicine is evolving rapidly with new and better medical techniques being elaborated. But the new procedures tend to become more and more complex. There is no better way than to practice them for medical students. But training with live patients is very risky and this is assuming that there are many patients requiring such medical techniques. So this is why virtual reality (VR) technique is being widely applied. As defined by Kaltenborn and Rienhoff [1], VR is a part of computer science, allows computer-based models of the real world to be generated, and provides humans with a means to interact with these models through new human–computer interfaces. VR becomes a substantial and ubiquitous technology for education, learning and training. Pletcher et al. [2] introduced a fully immersive VR platform for medical education consisting of medical readiness trainer (MRT). The researchers in the university of Aberdeen had developed and integrated computer-assisted learning (CAL) applications into the undergraduate medical curriculum to cope with an increase in student numbers whilst maintaining the quality of medical teaching [3]. Dornan et al. [4] described qualitative analysis of students’ requirements in their medical skills curriculum and proposed a web-based presentation of clinical skills curriculum. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the Anatomic VisualizeR is a VR-based environment for the teaching and learning of clinical anatomy initially developed by the University of California [5]. It was successfully applied in the real teaching and learning procedure. The field of VR in medical education is gaining recognition and various efforts have been undertaken to improve medical education and training. The VR-based education and training will be the principal platform in the new century.

One of the main problems for medical education is to provide the students with a realistic sense of the interrelation of anatomical structures in 3D space. With the help of virtual reality learning environment (VRLE), the students can explore the interesting structures, take them apart or put then together, and view them from almost any perspective. VRLE provides the realization of a highly dynamic form of simulation through intuitive interactions with the computer. As you experience a true sense of presence, the virtual environment constitutes a very personalized way of learning, which can be very motivating for the students. They can practice the techniques almost whenever they want and as many times as they feel they require.

The main disadvantage of a current immersive VR system like CAVE is its high cost, high complexity and inability for being applied in a multi-user environment. In addition, these complex tools cannot be operated on the Internet. With rapid improvements in computers and network, new inexpensive VR technologies are developed and one of them is called virtual reality modeling language (VRML). VRML runs on a personal computer and can be operated on the Internet easily [6]. On the side of visualization, researchers also developed some easily used toolkits such as visualization toolkit (VTK) [7]. The purpose of this research and development work is to employ common VR and visualization tools for implementing VRLE, trying to share the experience with others who develop similar systems without a professional knowledge of VR or techniques.

The organization of this paper is as follows. In the previous section, we have introduced the background of our research work and some related work. In Section 2, we will discuss the design consideration and architecture of our prototype system, including a brief description of VRML/X3D and VTK. In Section 3, we describe the technical detail of VRLE for medical education. Finally, in Section 4, important issues relating to the future work are discussed.

Section snippets

VRML/X3D

VRML is a scripting language developed by SGI and its initial 1.0 specification was published in November 1994 [8]. Since it is easy to learn and apply to practical problems, VRML is used by more and more users. And nowadays, VRML has already established itself as the standard for the exchange of 3D format for the distribution of virtual world on the Internet. VRML's latest incarnation is X3D, which updates the specification to more modern standards, including additional graphics features and

Implementation and experimental results

Based on the design principles, we implemented a prototype system based on VRML and VTK. We will discuss the detailed implementing techniques in the following sub-sections.

Conclusions and future work

VR-based education and training in medicine is the trend in the future [13]. The acceptance of VRML/X3D as a WWW file standard for 3D scene description provides the foundation of creating an interactive virtual learning environment. The prototype we have presented here takes advantage of the potential power of the WWW, VRML/X3D and VTK technology. It can be easily deployed in the classroom due to its simplicity and very low cost. As the hardware requirements for the client are very low, a

Acknowledgements

This project is supported by 973 project (grant no: 2002CB312100), Excellent Young Teacher Program of MOE in China, ELVIS Project of Asia-Europe IT&C program, and National Natural Science Foundation in China (Grant no. NSFC 60473107).

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