Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research (CfTH)

Virtual Reality & Cybermedicine

• B.A.T.C.A.V.E.: Basic Advanced Trauma Computer Assisted Virtual Experience provides clinical simulation experiences, education and research to the people of New Mexico. This multidisciplinary education facility provides training and educational experiences for over 80 health care scenarios.
  For further information see their website
  
  
• T.O.U.C.H.: Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health Project TOUCH (Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health), is a collaboration between the Schools of Medicine at the State Universities of Hawaii and the University of New Mexico. The project involves the integration of advanced technologies to enhance experiential problem-based learning over distance. Both New Mexico and Hawaii face similar challenges in providing care to medically underserved, cultural diverse populations, spread across large geographic areas. Together, the respective Schools of Medicine formed a multidisciplinary, inter-institutional group. This group explored the feasibility of utilizing emerging technologies to overcome geographic barriers to delivery of medical education in the communities of need, and to enhance the learning process with immersive virtual reality, patient simulation, and volumetric image manipulation utilizing high-performance computing methods. Both Schools of Medicine employ a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum, which focuses on small group interaction and experiential, case-based learning.
  Watch the Overview Video on Project TOUCH.
  
  
• Reification Simulation of the Kidney’s Filtration Process
  (Click to run an Activex control – Click on the play arrow beneath the picture)
  Our interdisciplinary team has been developing a virtual reality model of the nephron into which important physiologic functions can be integrated and rendered into a three dimensional virtual environment called Flatland, an open source virtual environments development software tool, within which learners can interact using off-the-shelf hardware. The nephron model can be driven dynamically by a rules-based artificial intelligence engine, applying the rules and concepts developed in conjunction with subject matter experts. Incorporated into the model is music and sound to assist the user in understanding the data they encounter and improve their orientation within the virtual nephron. In the future, the nephron model can be used to interactively demonstrate a number of physiologic principles or a variety of pathological processes that may be difficult to teach and understand.