- Buckinghamshire NHS Trust has partnered with Cambridge-based medical technology design experts at Team Consulting to develop a concept training tool that could change burn care and treatment, as well as significantly reducing costs in the process.
- Concerned with training efficacy and resources, experts at the Buckinghamshire NHS Trust wanted to try a new approach to burn care and treatment.
- Incorporating mixed-reality, the new tool allows surgeons to explore a diverse range of burn types and patient profiles, helping to boost confidence and patient outcomes.
- The tool could help improve the quality of burn care and treatment training and cut costs for the NHS.
Buckinghamshire NHS Trust has partnered with Cambridge-based medical technology design experts at Team Consulting to develop a concept training tool that could change burn care and significantly reduce training and resource costs in the process.
Mr Stefan Hudson, Clinical Innovation Fellow, and Mr Ryan Kerstein, a Consultant Plastic Surgeon at the Buckinghamshire NHS Trust developed the initial idea after noting several challenges that the Trust experienced when training surgeons in burn assessment and care.
The current process involves employing specially trained prosthetics artists to overlay burn patterns on medical mannequins. However, the cost of each mannequin is in the region of £120K, making them an expensive training tool.
The mannequins used also often have generic characteristics for skin, age and sex, which does not provide much-needed context for burn injuries or how they can affect different patient presentations.
For surgeons, the absence of diversity can cause a lack of confidence when working with real-life patients. The cost and time investment in producing these mannequins also means that the training process isn’t delivering as much value as it could be.
Collaborating with engineers and UI/UX experts at Team Consulting, Mr Hudson and Mr Kerstein wanted to explore a mixed-reality concept and believed that physical and virtual environments could provide better training scenarios for surgical staff.
To understand the current training process and provide the best solution, members from Team Consulting took part in the NHS burn simulation course at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire to see first-hand the challenges that training surgeons face, and how they could be overcome.
The team determined that a concept training application could map a wide range of digital burns onto a single mannequin or actor – and could work with just a smartphone and a virtual reality headset.
Using a mannequin arm, software engineers trained a computer vision model to recognise the limb in real life. Once detected, the ‘digital burns’ can be overlaid on top to match its size and shape. Since the burns are mapped, surgeons are able to pick up and interact with the limb without disrupting the digital overlay.
User experience specialists then stepped in to create realistic and high-fidelity burn simulations, which factored in characteristics such as depth, size, cause and location to give surgeons different patient scenarios.
The team worked together to create a highly customisable user interface program, to allow surgeons to seamlessly create their own training scenarios. They also incorporated a live-stream feature, allowing teachers and training surgeons to interact and provide feedback on training in real-time.
Reflecting on the development process, Thorbjorg Petursdottir, Consultant Electronics & Software Engineer at Team Consulting said:
“To achieve mixed reality in a burn simulation, we had to overcome several technical challenges. The software team went through iterative prototyping and testing to prove feasibility rapidly. Collaborating closely with clinicians to understand the problem they were faced with; overcoming technical hurdles while continuously learning something new, before finally presenting them with an innovative solution, was immensely rewarding.”
Mr Stefan Hudson, Clinical Innovation Fellow in the NHS, also reflected well on the collaborative process.
“I found the entire process of working with Team Consulting really fantastic. Everyone was very engaged and interested, they actually cared about the problem and came up with innovative ideas throughout the course of the project.”
Although still in development, the ultimate goal of the concept tool is to provide a richer teaching and learning experience, allow users to develop confidence in treating a diverse range of patient profiles, and improve treatment outcomes, all whilst reducing training costs and resource allocation.
The team at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust currently have plans to develop it into a commercially available product. Further functionality options to refine and improve the product for commercial use are also being considered.
