Development and Validation of a Virtual Reality Tutor to Teach Clinically Oriented Surgical Anatomy of the Ear

Virtual reality (VR) is being increasingly used in medical education. However, investigations into its effectiveness in this field have yielded mixed results, indicating that no general conclusions can be drawn in this regard. Therefore, the suitability of a system to teach a given task has to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. In this paper, we focus on teaching clinically oriented surgical ear anatomy, as it is important to provide a well-rounded view of ear anatomy as a foundation for understanding clinical surgery. Although there are some VR systems that teach basic ear anatomy, for example, identification of structures and spatial relationships, to our knowledge, those that deliver a complete clinical understanding of ear anatomy do not yet exist. As such, we discuss the design and development of a 3D interactive VR tutor with integrated haptic capability to teach clinically oriented surgical anatomy of the ear and establish its effectiveness through a user study.