Evaluation of Techniques for VR Visualizations of Airborne Bacteria in Surgical Settings

Sammanfattning

To achieve a safe and sustainable operating room environment, controlling airborne bacteria is essential. However, there is a knowledge gap among medical staff regarding the spread of airborne bacteria and how they contaminate the environment. VisBac is a software developed to utilize state-of-the-art virtual reality and visualization techniques to transfer procedural knowledge of airborne bacteria control to medical staff. Users can explore a digital twin of an operating room and observe airborne bacteria contamination in real time using either the particles visualization or the streamlines visualization. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of these two visualization techniques in facilitating the transfer of procedural knowledge. A comprehensive user study was conducted, involving two flow visualization tasks designed to assess each technique’s ability to illustrate both local and global airflow patterns. The results indicate that the particles visualization technique significantly improves accuracy in the local airflow pattern identification task and results in a lower perceived workload in the global airflow pattern task. Participants reported that particles visualization provided clearer and more intuitive visual cues, whereas streamlines visualization was perceived to have more visual clutter. These findings suggest that the particles visualization is generally more effective for training medical staff in understanding airborne bacteria control in operating room environments.