Touching the Ground: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Data Physicalizations for Spatial Data Analysis Tasks.

Inspired by recent advances in digital fabrication, artists and scientists have demonstrated that physical data encodings (i.e., data physicalizations) can increase engagement with data, foster collaboration, and in some cases, improve data legibility and analysis relative to digital alternatives.

Virtual Reality Training for Central Venous Catheter Placement: An Interventional Feasibility Study Incorporating Virtual Reality Into a Standard Training Curriculum of Novice Trainees.

Objectives: This study assess the feasibility of integrating virtual reality (VR) simulation into the central venous catheter (CVC) placement training curriculum.

Design: The study consists of 3 parts: (1) Evaluating current manikin-based training for CVC placement through surveys for senior first-year anesthesia residents and cardiac anesthesia faculty who supervise resident performing the procedure; (2) Interventional study training novice trainees with VR simulator and assessing their reaction satisfaction; and (3) pilot study integrating VR training sessions into CVC training curriculum for first-year anesthesia residents.

Setting: Conducted at a single academic-affiliated medical center from December 2022 to August 2023.

Implementation of Routine In Situ Simulation in Residency Curriculum Targeting Competency in Technical and Decision-Making Skills.

Objective: To describe the development and implementation of a comprehensive in situ simulation-based curriculum for anesthesia residents.

Design: This is a prospective study.

Setting: This study was conducted at a university hospital.

Artificial Intelligence for Anesthesiology Board-Style Examination Questions: Role of Large Language Models.

New artificial intelligence tools have been developed that have implications for medical usage. Large language models (LLMs), such as the widely used ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, have not been explored in the context of anesthesiology education. Understanding the reliability of various publicly available LLMs for medical specialties could offer insight into their understanding of the physiology, pharmacology, and practical applications of anesthesiology.

Measuring Team Hierarchy During High-Stakes Clinical Decision Making: Development and Validation of a New Behavioral Observation Method.

Purpose: Hierarchy is often cited as a cause of health care team failure; however, there are no validated measures of team hierarchy. Research on group processes in sociology provides a theoretical framework-status characteristics and expectation states (SCES)-that explains the mechanisms that produce the observable power and prestige order (status hierarchy) of the team. The authors use this formal theoretical framework to gather evidence of validity by adapting the method to measure the status hierarchy of medical teams.

Modeling Haptic Interactions in Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD).

The ability to provide realistic haptic feedback is indispensable for virtual-reality (VR) based endoscopic colorectal surgery simulators. Despite its importance, force feedback is commonly simulated by simplified approximations with parameters manually tuned in preliminary evaluations due to the complexity of the dynamics of haptic interaction in colonoscopy interventions. Endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is a particularly challenging intervention that requires advanced manual skills for endoscopic control.

Disruptions to shared mental models from poor quality of service in collaborative virtual environments.

Collaborative virtual environments are being used in various applications ranging from online games to complex team training scenarios. The key to the success of such environments is the ability of the participants to form a shared mental model of the collaborative task being performed. Poor quality of service can deteriorate user performance and quality of experience, leading to a disruption of this mental model.

A Virtual Reality Memory Palace Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval from Scholarly Articles.

We present exploratory research of virtual reality techniques and mnemonic devices to assist in retrieving knowledge from scholarly articles. We used abstracts of scientific publications to represent knowledge in scholarly articles; participants were asked to read, remember, and retrieve knowledge from a set of abstracts. We conducted an experiment to compare participants' recall and recognition performance in three different conditions: a control condition without a pre-specified strategy to test baseline individual memory ability, a condition using an image-based variant of a mnemonic called a "memory palace," and a condition using a virtual reality-based variant of a memory palace.

Qualitative findings from a pilot stage implementation of a novel organizational learning tool toward operationalizing the Safety-II paradigm in health care.

'Safety-II' is a new approach to safety, which emphasizes learning proactively about how safety and efficacy are achieved in everyday frontline work. Previous research developed a new lesson-sharing tool designed based on the Safety-II approach: Resilience Engineering Tool to Improve Patient Safety (RETIPS). The tool comprises questions designed to elicit narratives of adaptations that have contributed to effectiveness in care delivery.

Endoscopic submucosal dissection: a cognitive task analysis framework toward training design.

Background: One of the major impediments to the proliferation of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) training in Western countries is the lack of sufficient experts as instructors. One way to address this gap is to develop didactic systems, such as surgical simulators, to support the role of trainers. Cognitive task analysis (CTA) has been used in healthcare for the design and improvement of surgical training programs, and therefore can potentially be used for design of similar systems for ESD.

Using visual design experts in critique-based evaluation of 2D vector visualization methods.

We describe an experiment in which art and illustration experts evaluated six 2D vector visualization methods. We found that these expert critiques mirrored previously recorded experimental results; these findings support that using artists, visual designers and illustrators to critique scientific visualizations can be faster and more productive than quantitative user studies. Our participants successfully evaluated how well the given methods would let users complete a given set of tasks.

CAVE and fishtank virtual-reality displays: a qualitative and quantitative comparison.

We present the results from a qualitative and quantitative user study comparing fishtank virtual-reality (VR) and CAVE displays. The results of the qualitative study show that users preferred the fishtank VR display to the CAVE system for our scientific visualization application because of perceived higher resolution, brightness and crispness of imagery, and comfort of use. The results of the quantitative study show that users performed an abstract visual search task significantly more quickly and more accurately on the fishtank VR display system than in the CAVE.

Comparing 2D vector field visualization methods: a user study.

We present results from a user study that compared six visualization methods for two-dimensional vector data. Users performed three simple but representative tasks using visualizations from each method: 1) locating all critical points in an image, 2) identifying critical point types, and 3) advecting a particle. Visualization methods included two that used different spatial distributions of short arrow icons, two that used different distributions of integral curves, one that used wedges located to suggest flow lines, and line-integral convolution (LIC).