Development and Usability Testing of a User-Centered 3D Virtual Liver Surgery Planning System

The present study developed a user-centered 3D virtual liver surgery planning system called Dr. Liver, which has clinical applicability and effectiveness to support liver surgery. Use scenarios of Dr. Liver were developed through literature review, benchmarking, and interviews with surgeons. User interfaces of Dr. Liver were designed with various user-friendly features such as hierarchical dropdown menus, hotkey menus provided on the screen, and 3D view indication box and resetting buttons. Novel image processing algorithms were developed and implemented into Dr. Liver for accurate and efficient liver surgery planning. Potential usability problems were identified by a preliminary usability testing at the early development stage and improvements were made for the identified usability problems. A usability testing showed that the improved Dr. Liver achieved higher time efficiency (= 21.8 ± 4.4 min) and overall user satisfaction (= 6.2 ± 0.7) than the previous version (time = 36.6 ± 1.7 min; overall satisfaction = 5.6 ± 0.5). The development and evaluation process of Dr. Liver in this study would help practitioners develop a user-friendly virtual surgery planning system.