Virtual reality-based training for the diagnosis of prostate cancer

Prostate malignancies are the second leading cause of cancer deaths among men. The most common method of detecting this disease is digital rectal examination (DRE). Current DRE training is inadequate, since the number of patients that students can practice on is limited. Furthermore, allied care personnel do not train in screening for prostate cancer. Finally, there is no objective way to follow the improvement in DRE skills for medical personnel. This paper presents a virtual reality-based simulator that addresses the above problems. The prototype consists of a PHANToM haptic interface which provides feedback to the trainee's index finger, a motion restricting board, and an SGI workstation, which renders the patient's anatomy. Four types of prostates were modeled--normal, enlarged with no tumor, incipient malignancy (single tumor), and advanced malignancy (tumor cluster). Human factors studies were conducted on both nonmedical students and urology residents in order to quantify the system usefulness. After only five minutes of training, nonmedical students had a 67% correct diagnosis rate of malignant versus nonmalignant cases. This compared with 56% for urology residents in the same trials. Subjective evaluation by the residents pointed out the need to improve the virtual prostate model realism. A control group formed of urology residents performed the same trials on a modified Merck Procar simulator. The control group scored significantly better (96% correct diagnosis of malignancies). We conclude that the virtual prostate palpation simulator, while promising, needs significant improvement in both model realism and haptic interface hardware.