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The MedSMART Vision:
From Human Patient Simulation to Human Disease in Virtual Reality

HPS units provide unprecedented flexibility in training without risk of injury to the patient. However, the element of environmental setting, shown to play an essential role in effective training, has been generally ignored. Providers of emergency and trauma medical care frequently work under abnormal conditions within very stressful and austere environments characterized by a number of stressors that are typically absent in the classical hospital setting. Accident or disaster scenes, sick bays of ships at sea, helicopters, or field hospitals during humanitarian relief operations provide some of the best-known examples of such settings.

In order to acclimatize medical personnel to such environments the HPS unit has been placed within a fully immersive Computer Animation Virtual Environment (CAVE). The CAVE generates appropriate physical settings for the training scenario-ER patient bay, a field, a ship at sea, or OR-fills it with pertinent sounds, and can, if required, expose the trainees to entirely unexpected distracting events such as fires, loss of electrical power, earthquakes, sea gales, and more.

The innovators in these experiments are the same scientists now affiliated with MedSMART. The effort concentrates on the development of the initial models of human injury and disease that are based on virtual reality integrated with the sophisticated computer modeling of the relevant physiology. This allows a three-dimensional, graphic representation of extraordinarily complex phenomena, improve our understanding of their spatial and temporal relationships, and help in the understanding of their importance in disorders such as stroke, heart malfunction, or inflammatory diseases.

The new models actively championed by MedSMART will ultimately lead to a significant reduction of animal use in both biomedical experimentation and in medical procedure training. Apart from the purely emotional impact of such reduction, the substitution of animals with sophisticated computational/visual models will also yield a meaningful economic benefit by reducing, for example, the escalating cost of drug development. Despite initially high development costs of the simulation and modeling tools envisaged by MedSMART, eventual routine implementation will permit rapid hypothesis testing, improved targeting of pharmaceutical agents against the critical stages of the pathological processes, rapid screening against adverse effects, and improved preclinical and clinical trial design-the stages of drug development that reach multimillion dollar levels. MedSMART believes that the explosive growth of molecular biology, the continuously improving understanding of the human genome, and the simulation and modeling concepts envisaged by MedSMART will soon lead to a completely new approach to the studies of human disease and its treatment.

From clinical reality to virtual reality — training and research tools

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