February 6th Minutes

From: Ken Waldron

My notes from todays meeting are as follows:

Present: Parvati Dev, Robert Cheng, Ken Waldron, LeRoy Heinrichs, David Gutierrez, Juan Aragon, Margaret Krebs, Pat Youngblood, Steve Senger (videocon), Kevin Smith (telecon)

1 Immersive Simulation Curriculum
LeRoy reported on the work he is doing on this intended to support SMILE and the Clinical Skills Center. The focus is identification of clinical procedures that are primarily psychomotor and developing a curriculum around them. The intention is to prepare students in clerkships for seeing real patients. For the first time the curriculum development is being driven by student competency needs, not by the availability of technology. Also there is a focus on tools that can be used across the curriculum, not as proposed by a single faculty member for a single course.

2 Consortium
Meeting at V.A. attended by Parvati and LeRoy. other attendees were David Gabba? from the V.A. and Lou Halamic? from Packard Children's Hospital. Absent was Tom Krummel.

Several political issues dominated. The V.A. is worried that other simulation centers will draw away business. Halamic is getting resistance from vested interests at Childrens' Hospital oriented to large classroom teaching at low cost.

3 Network Tests
Juan and David have performed a series of tests, with help of Steve. They have been able to replicate the following delay problem observed in the Anatomy Event last November. The root cause has not been completely identified, but the problem appears to arise from the designed scaling behavior built into the client and server software. There may also be a bandwidth limitation problem. Steve has observed that clients running Windows 2000 exhibit the problem, while clients running Windows NT do not. This suggests client behavior may trigger the problem. Steve, Juan and David are continuing work on this issue. Parvati requested that they keep comprehensive records of all their tests.

4 SimTecT
LeRoy has provided suggestions on how surgeons are likely to respond to the proposed demonstration. Chris Gunn has responded with a clear statement of what the collaborative software is intended to address. We need more clarity on what we are trying to achieve with the demo. This is complicated by the likelihood that there are differences in objectives among the players. LeRoy suggests using the Reachin API as an overlay with one of their well developed simulation software packages. It was agreed that an off-line teleconference is needed to better define objectives and rough out a storyboard. Suggested participants are LeRoy, Pat Youngblood and a Stanford general surgeon, Pat Cregan, Chris Dunne, Duncan Stevenson and Kevin Smith. LeRoy will organize the teleconference.

5 Imperial College
Kevin reports that CSIRO has two Polhemus trackers that might be suitable for the Imperial College demo.

6 Quarterly Report
Ken presented a draft report template that he proposes to use as a basis for all reports. The organization follows the proposal, which is not ideal since it will require some cross-referencing. Not all headings will be addressed in any given quarterly report. The template will be a tool for organizing material and ensuring that nothing is forgotten.

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February 6th Minutes

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