POSTER
Sydney Kirages, Maya Raval, Taeyeon Kim, Michelle Zeng, Eva Peterson, Shruti U. Gharate, Eliot Bethke, Matthew T. Bramlet, Bradley P. Sutton, Jennifer R. Amos.
Steady improvements in imaging technologies have helped physicians make informed decisions regarding patient care. Virtual Reality (VR) and segmentation software are two technologies that continue to evolve and contribute to surgeons’ ability to understand the patient’s anatomy in 3D before surgery. Our research focuses on understanding the surgeon’s decision-making process while using VR during pre-surgical planning. Prior work has evaluated surgeons’ perceptions of VR as a planning and educational tool, but the process by which surgeons use VR to make decisions and plan their surgery has not been sufficiently studied. To this end, we created a method to align our observations of surgeons to a decision-making model. We observed four surgeons across nine clinical cases as they explained their individual thought processes while exploring the 3D model within the VR space. The VR recordings were independently, qualitatively coded, and these codes were subsequently mapped to the five phases in the Instance-Based Learning (IBL) Model - Memory, Recognition, Choice, Choice Threshold, and Judgement. Our analysis allows us to visualise the role VR plays in pre-surgical planning and identify the differences amongst the surgeons’ active and dynamic decision-making processes. This method shows promise as a tool to elucidate surgical decision-making with an impact on surgical education and clinical quality processes.