Immersive Haptic Interface Simulating Skin Biopsy for Dermatological Skill Training

Abstract

Dematological skill training is essential for medical students to perform successful skin tumor surgery. However, there is no exisitng system that can provide high-quality tactile simulation and training as the substitute of clinical training with patients. In this study, we developed immersive haptic simulation combined with virtual reality for simulating two important dermatological skills, outlining and incision, and investigated the effectiveness of the developed system to be used as a training tool at clinic or school. In the evaluation study, professional (dermatologists, residents, medical students) and non-professional (students in computer science) groups of people were invited to test the developed system in terms of usability and efficacy of multimodal feedback (virtual graphic and haptic feedback). The evaluation results suggest that the training system has potential for high adoption, especially with haptic feedback in a virtual reality envrionment. The quantitative results based on a proposed metrics prove the ability of the training that discriminate experts from non-experts as well as objectively measure the dermatological skills.