Interactive Learning: A Novel Gaming Application for Dermatology

Peter Lio, MD, FAAD, is clinical assistant professor of dermatology and pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. In this video, Dr Lio shares his insights and experiences utilizing Level Ex’s Top Derm, a gaming application, and its benefits for interactive learning in dermatology.

For more information, dermatologists are encouraged to visit the Top Derm website at https://www.levelex.com/games/top-derm.

Transcript:

Dr Lio:  We're able to take technology and leverage some of the really exciting aspects of video games, which is the fact that it can be repetitious in a very controlled way. You can get that same experience delivered over and over.

It can be customized to the individual, so this concept of adaptive learning, where maybe you're having trouble in one area. Then you can focus on that area going forward. Finally, I think it really frees us to do things that are very difficult, if not impossible, to do in other educational settings.

In the context of a lecture, for example, or a PowerPoint presentation, you have to tell a linear story. You have a certain amount of time. Even in someone's shadowing me in clinic, I can show them a number of things, but at the end of the day, they often don't get to see that patient longitudinally.

In the context of a game, we could actually tell a story, where we go from point A to point B to point C. Then we could have the learner, if they're interested, go back to a prior point and explore a different pathway and an outcome.

In so doing, I think we can encapsulate a huge amount of experiential data that normally is unavailable or inaccessible to learners. There are a number of different types of modules, and they do different things. Some are designed just to quickly reinforce learning, so they might be sorting texts, where you're just pulling something to one direction or the other.

That just quickly goes through a topic that maybe you know something about, or you just want to refresh it. Maybe you don't, but it's still a nice way with that repetition. Others require a little bit more cognitive load.

You're reading more of a question stem, and you're thinking about how things fall into place. Then what's really neat about dermatology is others require visual connections. You're looking either at histologic images, or clinically rendered images, or in some cases, photographs as well, to tell a story or look at a case and give a diagnosis and treatment.

There's really a number of different approaches, and I'd like to say that I think and hope this is only the beginning. This is the first iteration, but the vision is that we're going to be adding different types of modules with different experiences on as we go further.

Frankly, now, the world is getting smaller and smaller in many ways, so we have to think globally. Part of the issue in dermatology is that certain conditions are more represented in certain areas, and so there's really an imbalance sometimes. That may truly not reflect what we're actually going to see in clinic.

One of the exciting things about top derm and what Level X is doing as a company is that artists -- really talented video game artists who can render things -- they're helping to create these, I like to call them, hyper-real images.

Images that are somewhere between a photograph, which is awesome, but sometimes hard to get. Or we often joke you're seeing the same photo. It's the one that was in the textbook, and now, it's on your exam. Also, between a drawing.

A really good drawing, if we think about an atlas of anatomy, many of the images are beautifully drawn, and they're drawn in a way to enhance and highlight the key features. If we can take the realism, the photorealism -- literally, in the case of a photo -- and the importance and highlighting of the key features in a drawing, imagine putting those together.

I think that's really what we can do with rendered graphics and rendered images. Now, that's been hard, because sometimes, we get the dailies back and say, "What do you think? Does this look like this condition?"

I'm like, "Huh. It kind of does, but it's a little too wet," or, "I don't understood. It looks like it's too deep in the skin." These are weird, obscure ways to explain it, but the artists, they get it. They go, "OK, I understand."

They can change different parameters, this subsurface scattering, and change the reflections. Then it looks great. I say, "Oh, my gosh. This is the best case I've ever seen." If I could explain to someone or express to someone how I envision this disease, this is what I would show them.