Short Presentation

Virtual Patient

The project developed an e-learning platform that simulates the interactions between a medical student or resident and a virtual clinical patient for the diagnosis and treatment of acute and chronic cardiovascular diseases. The platform simulates real-life clinical scenarios in which the student plays the role of the doctor who initiates a dialogue with the virtual patient to find out his history, performs an anamnesis and physical examination, requests paraclinical investigations, establishes a diagnosis and recommends a treatement plan. The interface of the virtual patient allows interaction in written and spoken natural language, in Romanian and English. The interaction of the student with the virtual patient can be viewed by the teacher, both synchronously and asynchronously, with the teacher giving notes and feedback for the actions performed by the student.

Data were collected and anonymized for a number of 5 clinical cases for patients with unique conditions, respectively: Pulmonary Thromboembolism, Aortic Stenosis, Myocardial Infarction, Mitral Regurgitation and Cardiac Insufficiency; and a number of 2 clinical cases of patients who have two or more conditions, respectively: the first case in which the patient simultaneously suffers from acute inferior myocardial infarction, severe functional mitral regurgitation and heart failure; and the second case where the patient suffers from heart failure and mitral stenosis simultaneously.

An automatic scenario generation algorithm was developed for the different clinical cases (mentioned earlier), with data consistency checking, and synthetic data were generated to expand the datasets.

The platform was validated with 5 groups of students from UMFCD in several stages, totaling a number of 210 users: 178 students from UMFCD, as direct beneficiaries of the platform, 25 students from UNSTPB to evaluate the technical aspects of the platform (total students 203) and 7 teachers from UMFCD. Feedback was collected from them. The results of the feedback were analyzed and used to improve the functionality and performance of the platform. Students considered the Virtual Patient platform as a significant aid in learning, and teachers shared the same opinion with students.