A serious virtual reality game to train spatial cognition for medical ultrasound imaging

Understanding spatial relationships in medical ultrasound imaging is difficult. This work presents an approach towards using a serious game to teach spatial understanding for medical ultrasound in a non-medical virtual reality context. The created virtual reality environment resembles a toy factory, in which the user has to solve object recognition tasks by using a probe that produces 2D ultrasound-like slice images. The results of a first evaluation show that the game in combination with virtual reality is seen as attractive and stimulating by the participants. We observed that the participants' performance improved with repeated usage of the system. The evaluation also revealed that self-descriptiveness of the game is a critical factor, which in our case needs to be improved.