Towards VR Simulation-Based Training in Brain Death Determination

Patient protection and university hospital specialisations render a systematic training of physician-related skills increasingly difficult. Substitutes such as manikins or actor-based role-playing simulations are expensive and cannot be used for all clinical situations. As a consequence, teaching practical clinical skills has become one of the key concerns of modern medical education. Here we present a VR-based training prototype which allows medical students to perform brain death examinations in a virtual intensive care environment. Brain death diagnosis is a prime example for the challenges of medical education since it can neither be trained in simulations nor involve real patients, so that our simulation - for the first time - enables practical training of this legally obligatory and medically crucial diagnostic procedure. In particular, we motivate the use-case and teaching goals and describe the implementation of our prototype which is evaluated by medical experts to ensure medico-didactic standards.