Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date: Monday, October 13, 2003
Time: 4:00 pm to 5:00pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
       
Speaker:  Dr Jasmine Banks

Title: Using Virtual Environments to Understand Schizophrenia
       

Abstract:

Psychosis is a mental disorder that affects 1-2% of the population at
some point in their lives.  One of the main causes of psychosis is the
mental illness schizophrenia.  Sufferers of this illness often have
terrifying symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and thought
disorder.  This project aims to develop a virtual environment to
simulate the experience of psychosis, focusing on re-creating auditory
and visual hallucinations. 

This talk will describe the development of a virtual psychiatric ward
environment, and the psychosis simulation software.  The software was
written in C/C++ and based on an open source, cross platform scene
graph.  It is being developed for both the Windows platform, and the
IRIX platform, so that it can be run in the immersive curved screen
environment of the VISAC (Visualisation and Advanced Computing)
laboratory at UQ. 

The first version of the software re-created the hallucinations of one
particular patient.  Upon viewing the re-created hallucinations, the
patient commented that she was very impressed with the simulation, and
that it effectively re-created the same emotions that she experienced on
a day-to-day basis during her psychotic episodes.  This is important if
the software is to be used as an educational tool. 

The next version of the psychosis simulation software, which will
incorporate the hallucinations of a second patient, is currently being
developed, and this talk will also describe some of this work in
progress. 

It is hoped that this work will result in a useful educational tool
about schizophrenia, leading to improved training of clinicians, and
fostering improved understanding and empathy toward sufferers of
schizophrenia in the community, ultimately improving the quality of life
and chances of recovery of patients. 


Biography:

Jasmine Banks is a Research Fellow with the Advanced Compuational
Modelling Centre, University of Queensland, and is currently involved
with a number of visualisation and image processing related projects, in
addition to some lecturing.  In 1993 she completed her undergraduate
degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Information
Technology at QUT.  After working for a while as a software engineer she
returned to QUT and completed her PhD in the field of computer vision in
2000.  Following this, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Germany, before returning
to Australia to take up her current position at the University of
Queensland in Sep 2001. 

URL: http://www.acmc.uq.edu.au/~jbanks


Further Information: contact Peter Strazdins, Peter.Strazdins[at]cs.anu.edu.au

URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20031013