NGI Vision

SUMMIT's vision is to develop an innovative approach in medical education utilizing the capacity of the NGI to make a quantum leap in the content and quality of future learning in biology and health sciences.

We are creating innovative applications forteaching human anatomy and basic surgical manipulations using a collaborative, simulation-based learning environment that exploits the unique capabilities envisioned by the Next Generation Internet (NGI). Through these applications we seek to change the environment in which future professionals can be trained.

The followings are the five on-going projects in NGI:

The Next Generation Internet Gigabit Test Bed	The Anatomy Workbench: The Stanford Teaching Hand
The Surgery Workbench: Fundamental Manipulations of Surgery	The Stanford Visible Female Lucy 2.0
The SURGSIM Project

The key elements of our project are

• To deploy advanced visualization and modeling techniques to improve anatomical visual-spatial understanding and reasoning
• To enrich the visual experience with real-time haptic perception of the physical characteristics of life-like structures
• To foster collaboration among instructors, students, and professional colleagues in a wide variety of healthcare settings
• To promote pedagogical methods that encourage students to actively integrate knowledge into coherent conceptual models
• To evaluate rigorously the impact of this new technology on learning

Ultimately, we seek to promote a "thinking out-of-the-box" problem-solving approach by enabling professionals to experience, as early in their training as possible, the full potential offered by information processing and computational methods.