Recently, Dr. Tobias Blum successfully defended his dissertation investigating the effect of Augmented Reality as a man-computer interface to be used for education and training in medicine. In particular, standard imaging modalities of today’s diagnostic and surgical workflows have been integrated into Augmented Reality views to better transfer knowledge and fully take advantage of available medical instrumentation.

Abstract: “Due to the increasing interest in computer-based medical education and training, human computer interaction is becoming an important research topic in this domain. Medical education and training is a complex domain where interests of medical students, hospitals and well-being of the patients have to be carefully considered. To optimally support medical education, future systems need to make use of latest visualization techniques, allow for intuitive interaction and use appropriate domain models such that computer systems can interpret the interaction with the user and provide optimal feedback.

An important strategy for improving human-computer interaction in medical education is to develop systems that have a model of the knowledge domain. For this purpose methods for generating statistical models of medical workflow are discussed and examples of their use in medical training for laparoscopic surgery and ultrasound examination are presented. In addition, this thesis presents the first comprehensive literature review on computer-based ultrasound simulators and teaching concepts that are enabled by these simulators. Furthermore, this thesis describes the implementation of an augmented reality (AR) ultrasound simulator and novel concepts for teaching ultrasound using AR. For education of anatomy an AR magic mirror system is introduced, which creates the illusion that the user can look into her body and explore her anatomy in conjunction with its corresponding medical imaging data. A new metaphor for touch-free gesture-based interaction is introduced and its implementation within the AR magic mirror system is evaluated and discussed. This thesis provides therefore a complete chain of medical workflow modeling, simulation and AR visualization, and integrates them all into novel computer-based interactive teaching and training systems, which have been fully implemented and partially evaluated together with many clinical partners.”