AI doesn't replace doctors.
It trains them.
ECLIME is an extended-reality and AI research lab inside the Department of Surgery at SIU School of Medicine, developing AI systems for medical education and assessment — including procedural analysis, oral board simulation, case authoring, and the conversations medical training rarely rehearses.
The AI moment hasn't reached medical education. Decades of methods, largely unchanged. A field built around lifelong learning, still taught with tools from a generation ago.
ECLIME brings the frontier in — foundation models for examination and authoring, multimodal AI watching procedural skill, agentic tutors adapting to each learner. Built with the clinicians who guide them, used by the students, residents, and physicians who train with them. Quietly feeding the work that defines how the next generation will be taught.
See the work.
A few of the systems built in this lab — an AI examiner that runs mock oral boards, a grader that scores suturing technique, an avatar for rehearsing the hardest patient conversations. All real, all working, and far from the whole list.
AI oral board examination
An AI examiner runs a full oral board — it asks, probes, then scores. After each session it returns personalized feedback, so residents track progress over time. Real practice for general surgery, cardiothoracic, vascular, urology, plastics, and anesthesiology.
AI suturing assessment
We trained AI to grade resident suturing the way faculty do — needle angle, tension, spacing, economy of motion. Feedback in minutes, not the weeks it used to take.
Difficult conversations simulator
Students rehearse the hardest talks — breaking bad news, end-of-life — with a responsive AI avatar. So the first one isn't a real one.
This is the surface. The lab runs deeper.
The lab, written down.
ECLIME operates inside SIU School of Medicine, sharing a roof with one of the largest academic simulation complexes in the region. Its AI and XR work is funded by a grant from the Springfield Memorial Foundation.
