title: Validation of a bovine rectal palpation simulator for training veterinary students.
abstract: Bovine rectal palpation is a necessary skill for a veterinary student to learn. However, lack of resources and welfare issues currently restrict the amount of training available to students in this procedure. Here we present a virtual reality based teaching tool -- the Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator -- that has been developed as a supplement to existing training methods. When using the simulator, the student palpates virtual objects representing the bovine reproductive tract, receiving feedback from a PHANToM haptic device (inside a fibreglass model of a cow), while the teacher follows the student's actions on the monitor and gives instruction. We present a validation experiment that compares the performance of a group of traditionally trained students with a group whose training was supplemented with a simulator training session. The subsequent performance in the real task, when examining cows for the first time, was assessed with the results showing a significantly better performance for the simulator group.
authors.affiliation: Glasgow Interactive Systems Group, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK. {sarah,stephen}@dcs.gla.ac.uk
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Baillie
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Crossan
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brewster
authors.forename: Dominic
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mellor
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Reid
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002417:Cattle; D002983:Clinical Competence; D004520:Education, Veterinary; D010173:Palpation; D012007:Rectum; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018634:Veterinarians