Web Applications for Surgical Education and Advanced Training

The demand on education in surgery increases and classical educational methods can not meet it adequately. Therefore web-based training systems are developed, which have to be concepted and developed using several didactical and conceptual methods to allow learners more efficient learning. For procurement of explicit and implicit expertise and to represent the enormous anatomic diversity static, interactive and dynamic visualizations of the patients data are preferable.

The LiverAnatomyExplorer is a web-based training system for the exploration of liver tumors and vascular trees. Design and realization of the system are carried out in close cooperation with several surgical experts and their teams. The tool is based on state-of-the-art web technologies such as SVG, X3D and WebGL and current web frameworks like jQuery, X3DOM and Raphaël. In contrast to existing medical e-learning systems, we provide interactive web-based 3D models of individual patient-specific liver data, and combine them with traditional clinical 2D imagery and a didactical concept. The LiverAnatomy-Explorer is enhanced by additional multimedia material, such as surgical images, movies and reports.