2008. “Evaluation of Game Engines for Simulated Clinical Training

The increasing complexity and costs of clinical training and the constant development of new procedures has made vir-tual reality based training an essential tool in medical ed-ucation. Unfortunately, commercial training tools are very expensive and have a small support base. Game engines of-fer unique advantages for the creation of highly interactive and collaborative environments. This paper examines the suitability of currently available game engines for developing applications for clinical educa-tion and training. We formally evaluate a list of available game engines for stability, availability, the possibility of cus-tom content creation and the interaction of multiple users via a network. Based on these criteria, three of the highest ranked engines are used for further case studies. We found that in general it is possible to easily create scenar-ios with custom medical models that can be cooperatively viewed and interacted with, though limitations in physical simulation capabilities make some engines less suitable for fully interactive applications. We show that overall game en-gines represent a good foundation for low cost clinical train-ing applications and we discuss technologies which can be used to further extend their physical simulation capabili-ties