Best Paper Award received by SCI faculty, graduate for third consecutive year

For a third straight year, the award for best research paper presented at the international Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference has been won by a team led by Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering faculty members. At the recent conference in Long Beach, Calif., the award went to Kanav Kahol, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Anushu Sridaran, a recent graduate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Marshall L. Smith, director of the Simulation and Innovation SimET Center WT-1 for Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix and Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the School of Computing and Informatics. 

Kahol and Panchanathan were also among authors of papers that won the award in 2006 and 2007. This year’s winning paper is titled "Physics Based Hybrid Deformation Model for Configurable HapticTraining for Virtual Surgery." The paper presents a configurable system for medical simulation that enables senior surgeons and medical practitioners to customize surgery simulation to individual needs of students. The paper fills a major void in medical simulation research, Kahol says. Medicine Meets Virtual Reality is the leading conference for emerging data-centered technologies for medical care and education.