Ontology Development Methodology for Virtual Reality-Based Training (VRT) in Ophthalmology Domain

Abstract

In healthcare, the concept of virtual reality (VR) has already been around for decades. Virtual reality training (VRT) in ophthalmology, for example, has the potential to offer signiðcant levels of skills transfer to novice ophthalmic surgeons, improved patient safety, and surgical competency. However, VRT in this domain still lacks the ability of capturing training scenarios and learning contents (e.g., surgical contents) in an explicit manner. In this context, ontology arriving from artificial intelligence has become a backbone of VRT. Nowadays, there is an increasing concern towards approaches that apply ontologies as domain-driven conceptual models that help to explicitly represent the training scenario taking place in virtual environments (VE). Unfortunately, recent studies have reported that all designed ontologies for VRT in general areas apply deficient components of ontological engineering, specifically methodology. Therefore, it is a good pioneer initiative to establish a unified methodology and apply the best ontology design approaches.