Radiology Diagnostic Trainer

A diagnostic trainer designed to simulate the high stress environement for radiology residents at Vancouver General Hospital.

problem

The demands of junior diagnostic radiology post-graduate medical education are particularly gruelling in the initial months of the second year of post-graduate medical education, as diagnostic radiology resident physicians must timely acquire these skills so that they may be able to safely and diligently handle independent call responsibilities.

solution

Radiology Diagnostic Trainer aims to provide radiology residents with a fail-safe practice tool by closely simulating a shift at the hospital. Residents should become proficient with the DICOM viewer interface and features as well as search patterns. They should also gain familiarity with the hospital environment, especially regarding specific protocols and working under distracting and stressful settings.

The transition from medical school into residency is gruelling as radiology residents are faced with the challenge of not only applying their medical knowledge but also adapting to the high stress environment of the hospital.

Project Goals

The aim of this project is to bridge the learning gap between medical school and residency, allowing incoming radiology residents to develop the necessary organizational and stress management skills required to effectively diagnose patients. It allows the residents to familiarize themselves with the PACS system, DICOM viewer interface and triaging protocols under a distracting and stressful setting.

Research Process

In order to create an application that simulates the working process of a radiologist in a hospital with the added real-life pressures, we had to first workout what the existing workflow in a hospital looks like. The graph below displays how a medical image is typically produced.

For our system, we spent time interviewing existing radiology residents on the pain points of the existing workflow. We debated between using AR for our simulator but decided on developing a Web Application as it would be more accessible for students than compared to AR headsets. We also brainstormed on how we could simulate a more ‘realistic’ workflow for the residents. However before anything, we first had to identify our users.

We identified two main users:

Radiology Residents (to train)
Radiology Staff (to upload medical assets)

For the radiology residents, we wanted our project to follow the PACS system with the additional feature of distraction tasks and notifications to simulate the hospital environment. For the radiology staff, we needed a feature where they could upload medical assets to feed into our training system.

So, here is our proposed workflow for both the users:

User Stories

In order to ensure that each feature of this product will deliver value to both our users, we created user stories as part of our research stage.

Information Architecture

After mapping out the user flow and user stories for this product, I began ideating and constructing the product’s infrastructure, features and hierarchy.

Both Users Helping Each Other

We wanted to communicate that this is not simply a diagnostic trainer for radiology residents but hospital teaching staff can also use this to upload their sample case files for educational purposes.

PACS Worklist

PACS (Picture Archiving Communications System) is used in digital radiography to manage the storage, retrieval and distribution of DICOM images (X-rays, MRIs, CAT scans). For our users to get effective training, we needed our product to follow a similar system to that of VGH’s (Vancouver General Hospital), which was the PACS worklist.

Distraction Notifications

In order to replicate the real life hospital environment, we integrated distraction notifications that interrupted the ‘normal’ workflow for our users. These included 3 main type of distraction notifications that are appeared randomly on the top right of our PACS worklist screen during a training session.