Enhancing Collaboration on a Cloud-Based CVE for Supporting Surgical Education

Abstract

In recent decades, a greater number of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have been developed and sought for collaborative training of medical personnel in VR. Observing the needs identified in the literature, a multidisciplinary team developed a collaborative simulator for education and assessment of student groups in basic surgical routines, called SimCEC. The system was developed according to a strict methodology of design. Considering important needs with regard to storage guarantee, consistency and availability of the CVE, SimCEC was recently added by a cloud data distribution architecture for managing multiple virtual rooms for training of student teams, enabling collaboration among different areas of health. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical aspects of such tool, as well as its advantages and the new possibilities offered for surgical education area.