Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study based on ethnographic methods, we investigated how using a three-dimensional (3D) printed liver influenced doctors during liver resection surgery. Results of the analy- ses implied that using the 3D printed liver enhanced the con- struction of elaborate mental models of patients’ livers, the mental simulation of liver resections, and the construction of shared mental models of patients’ livers among doctors. Based on these results, we compared the advantages of using a 3D printed liver over a two-dimensional (2D) and a 3D image dur- ing surgery.