Virtual patients in clinical medicine.

Virtual Patients are an essential component of medical virtual reality. Most work to date has been dedicated to virtual patients in surgery. However, virtual patients also have a strong potential in clinical medicine, where they can be used as visual interfaces to knowledge-based systems in various simulation and training applications. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a virtual patient in the field of cardiac emergencies and propose directions to extend the development of virtual patients towards the integration of multiple physiological sub-systems.