Virtual Patient Simulation

The undergraduate curriculum at the medical school of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) has a duration of twelve semesters (six years) and is divided into the preclinical and clinical courses.

The medical students follow the preclinical courses in the first three years of their studies. They attend lectures and participate in laboratories' exercises about basic sciences, such as Biology, Genetics, Biochemistry, Medical Physics, Physiology, Anatomy, Histology, Pathology, Microbiology and Pharmacology.

Unfortunately, the enormous number of lectures in contrary with the few laboratory exercises have as a consequence that there is no clear correlation between the basic science lessons and their importance for the daily medical practice.

For instance, there are simulators, manikins or automatic robots, which simulate human functions such as breathing or responding to stimuli, that are exploited in many medical universities worldwide in order to facilitate students education.

Another kind of medical simulation is a virtual patient (VP). The definition of a virtual patient was provided by Medbiquitous, that is an international organization, established by John Hopkins Medicine, which aims to the creation of open technological standards for medical education. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is among Medbiquitous' members. According to this organization, «a virtual patient is defined as an interactive computer simulation of real-life clinical scenarios for the purpose of medical training, education, or assessment».

In Greece, the first virtual patients cases were developed by several medical teachers and their research associates at the Medical School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the educational projects mEducator, ePBLnet and Ariadne, which intended to contribute to the curriculum transformation by embracing the utilization of the new technologies during medical students

The VP architecture includes five fundamental elements:

The «VP data», which are information of the medical history and the medical examination related to the scenario and are necessary to the users in order to complete the VP case successfully.

The «media resources», which are digital files, such as X-rays, respiratory sounds and are also correlated to the scenario

The «data Availability Model», which specifies how the data are exposed

The «activity model», which determines the way that the users are interacted with the VPs

The «VP player», which exhibits the VP to the user.

For the development of the VPs, firstly, the authors had to create the medical scenario. Subsequently, they designed the labyrinth of the scenario by converting educational material to digital form with the assistance of VUE. VUE (Visual Understanding Environment) is a software program that was made available by Tufts University.

At the end of the process, the authors used the program OpenLabyrinth in order to complete the virtual patient. OpenLabyrinth is a free web application for creating interactive exercises like virtual patients and other serious