V-Frog: Applying virtual surgery principles to dissection simulation

Virtual Reality provides a great opportunity to build synthetic environments that are safer, cheaper, and offer better learning environments than their physical counterparts. Surgery training is an area that has wholeheartedly adopted Virtual Reality as an invaluable medium for training. Today, virtually every surgical procedure has an associated Virtual Reality trainer available. We propose to take the technologies developed in the virtual surgery domain and adapt them to a virtual dissection simulation, called V-Frog. The student will be able to cut a virtual frog with a virtual scalpel, and use any other tool that he or she might with a physical dissection. The software will run on a commodity personal computer using only a standard mouse for input. The system will have built in supplemental content, including organs and tissues that can be queried and activations that bring biological systems (circulatory, digestive, etc.) to life inside the very specimen the student is working on. The project builds on the successful results of Phase I which demonstrated feasibility of the system. The Phase II work includes building the entire frog anatomy and content, completing the virtual tool palette, and building the learning and assessment architecture which records and assesses students performance.