HCC VIRTUAL PATIENT

Virtual patient is an interactive computer simulation of a real clinical situation or an entire case designed to educate physicians. The HCC-VP.COM project presents case studies in the form of virtual patients and it is available in several languages. They are, in fact, serious games that can be an excellent complement to the traditional forms of education. It is a type of education gamification facilitating the development of specific skills such as clinical reasoning, decision making, and critical thinking. The integration of these computer simulations into the learning process has been repeatedly found to be very beneficial by students and teachers alike [1,2,3].

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver cancer and ranks among cancers with a high worldwide incidence and mortality [4]. This is one of the many diagnoses that require interdisciplinary collaboration between at least two medical specialities – in the case of this project, it is hepatogastroenterology and oncology. The diagnosis is usually made in collaboration between an outpatient hepatology office (or general practitioner's office) and a cancer centre in close collaboration with radiologists and other specialists, if necessary. Interdisciplinary collaboration is thus an absolutely essential condition for effective diagnosis and treatment at all stages.