Process Modeling of Ultrasound-guided Needle Placement Interventions

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Synopsis. Canadian medical universities are in the process of transitioning to a Competency- based Medical Education (CBME) model at all levels of training. Achievement of competence requires practice, and for reasons of patient safety and learner comfort, the early stages of practice are best done in a simulated environment. One of the skills that all medical doctors are required to demonstrate is ultrasound-guided needle placement (USNP), in procedures catheter port placement, anesthetic injections. The primary goal in these procedures is to insert a needle to target under ultrasound visualization, while sparing surrounding tissues. USNP is extremely difficult because it requires simultaneous mastery of multiple skillsets. While USNP is a mandatory skill for every new Canadian physician, there is a near complete lack of computing and engineering methodology and tools to support medical educators in the development of CBME programs for USNP. Research on the USNP process modeling is extremely scant, thus critically hindering medical educators in the mandatory transition to the CBME medical education model.***Research program. We aspire to fill these blanks through four themes: i) generalized process model for describing USNP workflows, ii) methods for automatic segmentation of USNP workflows into elementary procedural steps, iii) framework for designing quantitative performance metrics and, iv) data management framework for secure archival and retrieval of computer-assisted USNP training information.***Outcomes. The scientific contribution of the proposed program will be the development of formal analytical methodology and software tools that aims to support medical education researchers in creating CBME training programs. The societal outcome from the program is potentially significant; research that supports the development of CBME-compliant computer-assisted training systems will impact the competence of future medical doctors and as a result on the health of all Canadians. A least 20 HQP trained will be trained in engineering and computer science research. **