Effectiveness of a virtual reality-based interventional radiology simulator for medical student education

We developed an interventional radiology (IR) simulator using a virtual reality system (the VR-IR simulator) to teach IR procedures to medical students. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of this teaching method.

All ninety-nine fifth-year medical students attended a conventional classroom lecture. To teach students the actual procedure, they were randomly divided into two groups: One received conventional verbal explanations and educator demonstrations (the conventional group [n = 44]), and the other received VR-IR simulator training (the VR-IR simulator group [n = 55]). Afterward, they underwent a test using an augmented reality- (AR-) IR simulator (the VIST^® G5 image-guided AR-IR simulator, Mentice, Gothenburg, Sweden). The total procedure time, amount of contrast media used, fluoroscopic time, and patient peak skin dose in the simulated patients were compared between groups. A board-certified radiologist evaluated ten aspects of the procedure technique using a 5-point Likert scale (total: 50 points).

Two students in the VR-IR simulator group were excluded due to VR sickness and simulator malfunction. There were no significant differences between the VR-IR simulator group and the conventional group regarding total procedure time (median [25-75% interquartile range]: 13.5 [11.8-14.5] vs. 14.3 [12.3-16.8] minutes, p = 0.11), fluoroscopic time (10.1 [8.5-13.0] vs. 11.0 [8.6-13.7] minutes, p = 0.31), and patient peak skin dose (276 [243-373] vs. 303 [239-395] mGy, p = 0.57), respectively. However, the amount of contrast media used was significantly lower (28.0 [21.0-36.2] vs. 40.0 [32.3-50.9] mL, p < 0.01) and the technical achievement scores by the radiologist (36 [34-44] vs. 31 [29-32], p < 0.01) were significantly higher in the VR-IR simulator group.

The VR-IR simulator helped reduce the amount of contrast media in interventional procedures and improved technical achievement scores.