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Mixed reality, biosensors and AI for surgical training and practice.

The doctoral thesis at the Aristotle University School of Medicine, Department of Transplantation Surgery, Hippokration Hospital. 2020 to 2026, on a national fellowship from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. This page is the first draft; the data, the graphs and the OSF material follow.

The simulator

A VR operating room with a tutor that asks instead of tells

A cholecystectomy in VR, nine phases, hand tracking at the instrument. A Socratic tutor built on a language model reads where the hands are and what phase the trainee is in, and asks the question a good attending would ask: which structure must you confirm before the first clip? It never gives the answer first.

An operating field, softened The wearable study

Surgeons' fatigue, stress and recovery around real operating days

Heart rate, heart-rate variability, sleep stages, steps and a psychomotor vigilance test, collected with consumer wearables on a serverless platform with a watchdog for missed wear or sync. The question is how a surgeon's body carries an operating day and what recovers by the next.

George in scrubs before entering the operating room In the field

Pilots with the transplant unit

Protocols reviewed with the surgical team, recordings in the operating room with faces and patients kept out of frame, and final pilots in the autumn of 2026. Write-up planned for December 2026.

Papers and talks from the thesis
  • Exploring the use of virtual reality in surgical education. World Journal of Transplantation, 2023, doi 10.5500/wjt.v13.i2.36.
  • Under review: MIDAS, a unified platform architecture for telemetry-triggered Socratic LLM tutoring in virtual reality laparoscopic training and consumer-wearable peri-operative monitoring of surgeons.
  • Oral presentation, ESOT International Transplant Congress, Athens, 2023.
  • Workshop, Medical Informatics, Education and Innovation, IMEI, 2024.
  • Oral, 22nd Panhellenic Congress of Transplantations, 2024.
  • Full list on Google Scholar.

To add: OSF project link, the study graphs (own data only), simulator screenshots, the Socratic tutor transcript sample, and the thesis abstract once submitted.