Professor Jag Dhanda

Bio

Professor Jag Dhanda is an Oral and Maxillofacial/Head and Neck Consultant Surgeon with a subspecialty interest in head and neck oncology and reconstruction and a Professor of Surgery and Professor of Extended Reality in Medicine and Surgery. His NHS practice is limited to free tissue transfer for complex head and neck reconstruction. He has been the successful recipient of three Royal College of Surgeons of England research fellowships (college, board and specialty) and a CRUK fellowship for his PhD in oncogenomics. Professor Dhanda is the founder and clinical lead for Virtual Reality in Medicine and Surgery (VRiMS.net), a trainee resource using live streaming and restreaming of cadaveric surgical techniques in virtual reality. He is conducting studies to scientifically evaluate and validate extended reality in medical education. VRiMS has released a VR app for basic life support and fire safety training for mandatory training. His research group is also developing a skin cancer augmented reality app to guide surgeons in diagnosis and surgical techniques for managing facial skin cancer. Professor Dhanda regular travels to low to middle income countries to develop teaching resources using extended reality, His group raises funds to develop innovations for global surgery and donate surgical instruments to rural surgeons as well as providing training for all of the surgical specialties using extended reality.

Training surgeons requires extensive time, finances and specialist supervision but saves lives and improves outcomes. Virtual reality (VR) facilitates training resource dissemination to remote audiences. In Africa, the majority of surgical care is initially treated in remote centres, highlighting the need for surgical education of rural doctors. We have demonstrated feasibility of VR-enabIed surgical training for remote Iow-income and middle-income country doctors, with appeal across diverse socioeconomic settings. A combination of XR techniques, including 360video, 360video with virtual studio overlay, interactive video, synchronised VR training and 6 degrees of freedom enhances learning by enabling multiple perspectives within procedure, increases learner connectivity and improves onward knowledge sharing. Barriers to VR education include affordability, data connectivity limitations and need for breaks. Benefits include environmental, cross-cultural learning and scalability. We will present evidence of local desire to incorporate VR into African surgical training programmes; recommendation to embed VR within established education programmes, particularly where postgraduate opportunities are scarce. Such projects require strong collaborative cross-cultural networks and bespoke context-specific content design.

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