Immersive training of clinical decision making with AI driven virtual patients – a new VR platform called medical tr.AI.ning

BACKGROUND: Medical students need to be prepared for various situations in clinical decision-making that cannot be systematically trained with real patients without risking their health or integrity. To target system-related limitations of actor-based training, digital learning methods are increasingly used in medical education, with virtual reality (VR)- training seeming to have high potential. Virtually generated training scenarios allow repetitive training of highly relevant clinical skills within a protected, realistic learning environment. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), face-to-face interaction with virtual agents is feasible. Combining this technology with VR-simulations offers a new way of situated context-based, first-person training for medical students. PROJECT GOAL AND METHOD: The authors’ aim is to develop a modular digital training platform for medical education with virtual, interactable agents and to integrate this platform into the medical curriculum. The medical tr.AI.ning platform will provide veridical simulation of clinical scenarios with virtual patients, augmented with highly realistic medical pathologies within a customizable, realistic situational context. Medical tr.AI.ning is scaled to four complementary developmental steps with different scenarios that can be used separately and so each outcome can successively be integrated early within the project. Every step has its own focus (visual, movement, communication, combination) and extends an author toolbox through its modularity. The modules of each step will be specified and designed together with medical didactics experts. PERSPECTIVE: To ensure constant improvement of user experience, realism, and medical validity, the authors will perform regular iterative evaluation rounds. Furthermore, integration of medical tr.AI.ning into the medical curriculum will enable long-term and large-scale detection of benefits and limitations of this approach, providing enhanced alternative teaching paradigms for VR technology.