Highly-realistic, immersive training environment for hysteroscopy.

The primary driving application of our current research is the development of a generic surgical training simulator for hysteroscopy. A key target is to go beyond rehearsal of basic manipulative skills, and enable training of procedural skills like decision making and problem solving. In this respect, the sense of presence plays an important role in the achievable training effect. To enable user immersion into the training environment, the surrounding and interaction metaphors should be the same as during the real intervention. To this end, we replicated an OR in our lab, provided standard hysteroscopic tools for interaction, and generate a new virtual scene for every session. In this setting, the training starts, as soon as the trainees enter the OR, and ends when they leave the room.