Biopsym : a learning environment for transrectal ultrasound guided prostate biopsies

This paper describes a learning environment for image-guided prostate biopsies in cancer diagnosis; it is based on an ultrasound probe simulator virtually exploring real datasets obtained from patients. The aim is to make the training of young physicians easier and faster with a tool that combines lectures, biopsy simulations and recommended exercises to master this medical gesture. It will particularly help acquiring the three-dimensional representation of the prostate needed for practicing biopsy sequences. The simulator uses a haptic feedback to compute the position of the virtual probe from three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound recorded data. This paper presents the current version of this learning environment

Learning based automatic face annotation for arbitrary poses and expressions from frontal images only

Statistical approaches for building non-rigid deformable models, such as the active appearance model (AAM), have enjoyed great popularity in recent years, but typically require tedious manual annotation of training images. In this paper, a learning based approach for the automatic annotation of visually deformable objects from a single annotated frontal image is presented and demonstrated on the example of automatically annotating face images that can be used for building AAMs for fitting and tracking. This approach employs the idea of initially learning the correspondences between landmarks in a frontal image and a set of training images with a face in arbitrary poses. Using this learner, virtual images of unseen faces at any arbitrary pose for which the learner was trained can be reconstructed by predicting the new landmark locations and warping the texture from the frontal image. View-based AAMs are then built from the virtual images and used for automatically annotating unseen images, including images of different facial expressions, at any random pose within the maximum range spanned by the virtually reconstructed images. The approach is experimentally validated by automatically annotating face images from three different databases

The Effectiveness of Virtual Training: Comparing Virtual and In-person Sport-Specific Cognitive Training

The goal of the project is to outline the benefits of different types of cognitive training with physical or in-person training compared to a virtual training implementation specifically in the context of baseball pitch recognition. By doing this we are able to identify which aspects of pitch recognition are better trained by different types of training and allow athletes to train differently and more effectively. The participants were 21 undergraduate students at Bard College who have not played at a competitive level of baseball. Participants were assigned to two conditions either in-person cognitive training or similar but virtual training. Participants were tested on both their pitch type accuracy and strike accuracy in order to compare possible differences between the training implements. participants\u27 ability to identify the correct aspects of pitch type and strike accuracy within three seconds of viewing the pitch was assessed both in person and virtually. The hypothesis is that the virtual training group will outperform the in-person group in pitch type accuracy but the in-person group will outperform the virtual group in strike accuracy. The results showed that there was no significant difference in performance for strike zone accuracy between the virtual and in-person groups but there was a marginally significant difference between the virtual and in-person training groups for pitch type accuracy

Training the Trainer for a Virtual Classroom

As distance education was beginning to grow at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the libraries garnered their own virtual room through the campus wide license for Blackboard Collaborate. Having a virtual room allows for the librarians to offer orientations, host workshops, have meetings, or even offer virtual office hours. Hosting online workshops not only allows us to teach distance students, but allows both students and staff on campus to participate and learn virtually from their desks and get comfortable with online meetings and training. As online learning continues to grow and budgets continue to shrink, less travel is possible for training both internally and externally - but online learning opens more opportunities for all

The Effect of Online Training on Teams

Many organizations recognize the importance of utilizing teams to accomplish work (Chuboda et al., 2005; Devine et al., 1999; Ilgen, 1999; Martins et al., 2004). As technology has advanced, many of these organizations have recently become more reliant on virtual project work, which allows work teams to communicate across geographical distances (Driskell et al., 2003). Considering the growing prevalence of virtual teams in organizations, more needs to be known about how to facilitate virtual team effectiveness. In addition, the increased use of teams in organizations has identified and created the need for team training (Ilgen, 1999). Creating a training environment where the appropriate knowledge and skills transfer to a team should be taken into consideration for team performance (Marks et al., 2001). However, the literature provides inconclusive evidence on the effectiveness of the virtual team’s training environment. The goal of the current study is to add to existing knowledge regarding training and virtual teams. It is expected, based on previous research, that virtual teams who receive online training will yield the best performance results, while virtual teams who receive in-person training will yield the worst performance results. Sixty-four undergraduate students from Minnesota State University, Mankato participated in the study. Participants were placed in two person teams and were trained either on-line using web-based conferencing software or were trained in-person. Team members collaborated either virtually or face to-face. Results of the research will be discussed along with implications and future directions

LVC Interaction within a Mixed Reality Training System

The United States military is increasingly pursuing advanced live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) training systems for reduced cost, greater training flexibility, and decreased training times. Combining the advantages of realistic training environments and virtual worlds, mixed reality LVC training systems can enable live and virtual trainee interaction as if co-located. However, LVC interaction in these systems often requires constructing immersive environments, developing hardware for live-virtual interaction, tracking in occluded environments, and an architecture that supports real-time transfer of entity information across many systems. This paper discusses a system that overcomes these challenges to empower LVC interaction in a reconfigurable, mixed reality environment. This system was developed and tested in an immersive, reconfigurable, and mixed reality LVC training system for the dismounted warfighter at ISU, known as the Veldt, to overcome LVC interaction challenges and as a test bed for cuttingedge technology to meet future U.S. Army battlefield requirements. Trainees interact physically in the Veldt and virtually through commercial and developed game engines. Evaluation involving military trained personnel found this system to be effective, immersive, and useful for developing the critical decision-making skills necessary for the battlefield. Procedural terrain modeling, model-matching database techniques, and a central communication server process all live and virtual entity data from system components to create a cohesive virtual world across all distributed simulators and game engines in real-time. This system achieves rare LVC interaction within multiple physical and virtual immersive environments for training in real-time across many distributed systems