Heidi Phillips & Janet Sinn-Hanlon - The Virtual Canine Spay: Creating Multipurpose Reusable Assets for VR and Online Courses

Heidi Phillips & Janet Sinn-Hanlon - The Virtual Canine Spay: Creating Multipurpose Reusable Assets for VR and Online Courses

Heidi Phillips & Janet Sinn-Hanlon, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract: The time and cost of creating a VR application of an entire surgery with the polygonal density and texture detail needed to be educationally valuable to a veterinary student is prohibitive in a university setting. Creating medically accurate, believable models, textures and animations requires a team that minimally includes experienced professionals, such as a content expert (in our case, an experienced surgical instructor); medical 3D illustrators for modeling, UV mapping, and texturing; riggers and 3D animators; and a dedicated programming engineer. Rather than making our priority the creation of a VR application that encompasses an entire surgery and is downloaded to a headset, we propose first creating small Unity or 3D viewer applets of only the key steps in a surgical procedure. 

Segmenting the surgical VR experience into applets embedded in a multimedia online course and tethered to a high-end computer workstation has proven to be beneficial in the following ways: On the production end, this approach allows us to chunk the vast amount of content involved in an entire surgery into mini applets that can be assigned to students and free-lancers who are available for only short periods of time in an academic setting. It also allows us to test various asset production and programming techniques and pipelines before incorporating them into the production of a comprehensive XR application that can be used as a template for future veterinary surgery XR applications.  From an educational standpoint, incorporating 3D assets as they are produced into a multimedia online platform for our students allows us to test the educational effectiveness with students before incorporating them into a more comprehensive, totally immersive application.

Speaker Bios: 

Dr. Heidi Phillips is the inaugural Dr. John A. Coyne Professor in Small Animal Surgery at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and heads the Veterinary Teaching Hospital’s small animal soft tissue surgery service. She is internationally recognized for microsurgery, reconstructive surgery, and microvascular surgical education. Her work combines clinical innovation with research and training designed to improve surgical outcomes for companion animals.

Phillips leads a veterinary surgical-training initiative developing an eight-module VR course that prepares students to perform canine spay procedures with greater confidence and proficiency before operating on live animals. The initial modules cover interactive anatomy, instrument handling, and suturing and knot-tying. The team is also developing an assessment framework that builds on its prior motion-tracking research to compare VR-trained students with conventionally trained students and objectively measure skill development.   

Janet Sinn-Hanlon earned her master's degree in biomedical visualization from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Janet worked for many years for the Imaging Technology Group (ITG) at the Beckman Institute on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, where she consulted with researchers and graduate students in choosing and implementing software for quantitative analysis, visualization, and presentation of experimental data. She also worked with researchers to provide data visualization, 3D models, and illustrations for scientific presentations, articles, and journal covers.

In 2011, Janet joined the Design Group the College of Veterinary Medicine, where she produced original and data-derived 3D models, illustrations, animations and design for use in the veterinary educational curriculum, 3D prints for surgical planning, and research presentations. While at the Design Group, she collaborated with members of the Design Group, veterinary school faculty, and Dr. Alan Craig, Ph.D., formerly of NCSA, to create “Illinois Cow,” the school’s first Augmented Reality anatomy application.   

Janet now works for the iLearning Center and is currently collaborating with Dr. Heidi Phillips, members of ITG, HCESC, and iLearning to create a Virtual Reality Canine Spay.