Buckinghamshire NHS Trust has partnered with medical technology design experts at Team Consulting to develop a concept for a training tool that could change burn care and treatment.
It involves the use of mixed reality and a software application to map a wide range of digital burns onto a single mannequin or actor - and can work with a smartphone and a virtual reality headset.
The approach is said to provide a more cost-effective alternative to employing specially trained prosthetics artists to overlay burn patterns on medical mannequins that can cost around £120,000 each.
It also overcomes concerns over the mannequins often having generic characteristics for skin, age and sex, which do not provide much needed context for burn injuries and lead to absence of diversity, which can contribute to a lack of confidence when working with real life patients.
Stefan Hudson, clinical innovation fellow, and Ryan Kerstein, a consultant plastic surgeon at Buckinghamshire NHS Trust, developed the initial idea after noting several challenges in training surgeons in burn assessment and care.
Computer vision of burns
The new approach involves software engineers training a computer vision model to recognise a limb in real life. Once detected, the ‘digital burns’ can be overlaid on top of a mannequin limb through the headset to match its size and shape. Since the burns are mapped, surgeons are able to pick up and interact with the limb without disrupting the digital overlay.
User experience specialists have created realistic and high fidelity burn simulations, with characteristics such as depth, size, cause and location to give surgeons different patient scenarios.
This is supported by a highly customisable user interface program to allow surgeons to create their own training scenarios. It also incorporates a livestream feature, enabling teachers and training surgeons to interact and provide feedback on training in real time.
Although still in development, the ultimate goal of the concept tool is to provide a richer teaching and learning experience, allow users to develop confidence in treating a diverse range of patients, improve treatment outcomes and reducing training costs.
The team at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust have plans to develop it into a commercially available product. Further functionality options to refine and improve the product for commercial use are also being considered.
