Web-based Educational Simulators for Teaching Pathological Physiology

The educational experience in pathological physiology at the First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague shows that physiology and pathological physiology are closely related to physics, biochemistry and other technical disciplines which medical students are not used to. Deep understanding of physiological systems and regulations is very hard to achieve only by studying textbooks without appropriate learning tools. Therefore our objective is to incorporate computers into the process of education. A big part of our elearning activities resides in the development of applications which demonstrate the behavior of non-trivial physiological systems, their dynamics and regulation in a schematic, easily understandable, yet still precise manner. It is important to keep the form familiar to the students (similar to textbook illustrations) and to enable them to affect the simulation interactively, experiment with it and explain the complexity by experiencing the issue in a virtual reality. Simulations allow to demonstrate complex dependencies in physiological regulation systems and causal chains in pathogenesis of various diseases.