Simulation for team training and assessment: case studies of online training with virtual worlds.

Individuals in clinical training programs concerned with critical medical care must learn to manage clinical cases effectively as a member of a team. However, practice on live patients is often unpredictable and frequently repetitive. The widely substituted alternative for real patients-high-fidelity, manikin-based simulators (human patient simulator)-are expensive and require trainees to be in the same place at the same time, whereas online computer-based simulations, or virtual worlds, allow simultaneous participation from different locations.

The fundamental manipulations of surgery: a structured vocabulary for designing surgical curricula and simulators.

A structured vocabulary is proposed for supporting the design and development of advanced surgical simulators. Nine fundamental surgical instrument-tissue actions or manipulations are defined and common synonyms provided. The vocabulary focuses on "target skills" that are familiar to surgeons, in comparison with "enabling skills" from the lexicon of instructional designers and psychometricians.

LUCY: a 3-D pelvic model for surgical simulation.

Development of 3-D models of human anatomy for use in virtual reality simulators is anticipated to enhance surgical training. These models may be a valuable resource for gaining mastery of minimal-access procedures. The pelvis portion (hip to upper-thigh) of a 32-year-old female cadaver was frozen and sectioned axially in approximately 2-mm increments as the first step in producing an accurately representative 3-D model of the human female pelvis.