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Published by WJLA (with edits by MPower staff) | October 1st 2024

Editor’s Note: The University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State provided early, initial funding support to a multidisciplinary partnership that joins computing experts at University of Maryland, College Park with medical professionals at University of Maryland, Baltimore.  The collaboration, which continues today, creates new applications for visual computing for expanded uses in health care research, education and training like the technology described in this article.

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Artificial intelligence could transform healthcare including for students entering the medical field. The University of Maryland is harnessing the technology in innovative ways.

The university houses a HoloCamera facility and there’s a new simulation being developed to show what’s happening to the body when someone is experiencing a stroke. Inside the room, there are 360 degrees of green walls, dotted with 300 high-resolution cameras working together to create a 3D experience.

Dr. Cheri Hendrix, Director of the Physician Assistant Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, said she has been dreaming of technology like this for more than a decade.

She showed 7News On Your Side’s Lindsey Mastis a demonstration showcasing how they developed a new training module. Participants using a virtual reality headset can immediately see the heart ventricles come into view. The animation illustrates how a blood clot forms and travels to the brain.

She worked with a professional actress representing a stroke victim to go over standard protocols for a patient experiencing stroke symptoms. But in the virtual experience, students can see what’s happening to the body through a 3D animation.

“I can teach a stroke in the classroom. I can go over all the stroke types, and it could take four hours or better to really understand.” Dr. Hendrix said. “The way it used to be is sitting in the classroom being board of tears with death by PowerPoint and you’re handwriting all your notes.”

She said with this technology, students are learning in three minutes what used to take four hours to teach.

Amitabh Varshney, Dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, leads the HoloCamera project at University of Maryland. A $1 Million award from the National Science Foundation to help launch the HoloCamera facility. He said they’re using AI to fuse data from multiple directions and believes the results are better for student learning.

“In one of the studies we have done here, we have seen that if you allow a person to move around, walk around and look at things, it helps in recall,” Varshney said. “So in terms of educational outcomes, immersive environments are better at memory and recall than examining anything on just a desktop.”

Ryan Jetton and Ashlee Leshinski, students in the Physician Assistants program, are seeing the technology for the first time.

“It’s fascinating,” Jetton said. “There’s always that gap that you have to bridge from textbook to real life, and stuff like this just incorporates it so well.

“I think it’s so exciting to think about the way that we’re able to learn and continue to evolve our skills outside of just the clinical experience,” said Leshinski.

The new technology will be tested in November by splitting students into two groups. One will be using VR headsets with the immersive program, and the other will be learning the traditional way. They’ll compare the results to see which method is more effective. From there, Dr. Hendrix and her team hope to develop even more immersive training programs.

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