Inside a computer science office in College Park, Maryland, Ryan Jetton, a retired firefighter studying to become a physician assistant at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, was with a patient when suddenly someone next to him put that patient in a life-threatening situation.
All it took was the flip of a switch and suddenly the patient was in atrial fibrillation. Minutes later, they would be suffering a stroke. While the man next to Jetton had total control of the situation, he wouldn’t turn it off. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to.
The patient wasn’t real. Jetton could only see the patient and the doctor, who was with them, through the virtual reality goggles he was wearing. And that program actually made it possible for Jetton to see everything, including that patient’s vascular and nervous systems.
“They can basically show us in real time what is going on with the vasculature, the nervous system,” said Jetton. “He just turned the heart from a normal sinus rhythm. He hit a switch on his computer and turned it to an atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat which sometimes results in blood clots, embolus being sent to your vasculature in your brain, which is what this is going to simulate, which ultimately can result in a stroke.”
From there, Jetton was able to move around and see the patient from above, below, front and back. He could see a blood clot travel through the patient’s bloodstream.
“It’s really useful for transferring what we would normally get in real life, which is just the exterior of a patient, to understand what’s actually happening on the inside,” he said. “In the future, when we’re in the field, we’ll be able to take what she’s showing us in this video and apply it and understand what’s going on internally.”
“This allows us to see the external symptoms while seeing what’s going on internally, so we can correlate them together, and in the future, be able to do it with actual patients,” he added.
It’s a program that Cheri Hendrix, who is the director of the physician assistant program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had spent years dreaming about. It started with an email with Amitabh Varshney, the dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.
Varshney leads what’s known as the Holocamera Project.
“He just reached out of the blue to me one day and said he had a friend whose daughter was interested in becoming a PA. Would I be able to contact her and talk with her about my profession?” Hendrix recounted. “I’m like, absolutely. So hey, by the way, I see what your title is. I’m curious. What do you do?”
After a little more research, Hendrix approached him about collaborating on something together — something that’s possible through a partnership that exists between the University of Maryland and the University of Maryland, Baltimore even though they are two different schools.
“I said, ‘You know what? You’re the perfect group that I’ve been looking for, for over 15 years to test my ideas out in immersive technology, especially holographic overlays in a 3d environment as an adjunctive teaching aid,'” Hendrix said.
In plainer speak, she said she’s been dreaming about designing “an entire library — of very difficult to understand conditions — that any student would have an “aha” moment and understand it fully within about three minutes.”
That’s how Jetton was able to slip on some Meta Oculus goggles and see someone begin to have a stroke. And better for it to happen with virtual reality than in real life.
“It’s safe. It’s a safe environment where students can make a mistake,” said Hendrix. “We’re video recording them. We, as instructors, can pull them aside, ‘Let’s sit down and watch a recording. Tell me what your thought process was when you were going through this patient case.'”
Jetton said he could see similar uses of this for future paramedics, which he used to be.
“This sort of technology has application in so many different fields, not just health care, but specifically in health care,” he said.
Hendrix said it gives students a chance to develop clinical reasoning much faster than before, and hopefully down the line, it means a medical professional you see in real life can recognize your symptoms faster, too.
“It’s one thing to be in the classroom and teach them all the anatomy, then teach all the physiology, the pathophysiology, and then teach in the clinical medicine aspects,” she said. “I can teach all that over a number of classes in probably four to six hours, perhaps.
“For just the stroke that we did today, they could see it in less than three minutes,” she added.
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