The virtual reality technology has been developed rapidly in a decade, it used in various areas but especially meets the needs of medical treatments. What’s more, the commercialisation of VR techs is already at an advanced stage.
Diagnostics
The major use of VR-based medical treatment is Diagnostics. For example, the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders is largely based on a clinical interview and questionnaires initially. For some diseases like Parkinson, an accurate diagnosis is still a difficult task, but with VR techs, there is a more objective and standardized assessment methods to support the diagnostic process.
Medical Training
VR can also be used as VR-based medical training. It is more comprehensive than books, it provided an interactive and engaging setting enables an operator to learn through a first-person experience. It is also a convenient way to learn, as the users can train the medical skills at any time they want. Besides, since there is no patients are directly involved, it takes no risk for the patient. It will particularly improve the quality of the education and therapy, allow a long and efficient training sessions, and increase safety.
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Planning
Now days, using computer models to plan and optimise before an operation surgery is part of daily clinical practice. It is not possible to perform a operation without preoperative planning with the aid of a computer. So with VR-based techs, we are able to get some different surgical approaches with realistic prediction of the outcome (for example, postoperative appearance of the patient), and predict the safety of the operation.
Image Guided Surgery
Only a preoperative planning is not guaranteed in the operating room, but computer assistance and virtual reality technology can substantially contribute to the preoperative plans. Image guided surgery combined a virtual objects(data from the preoperative image) with real objects (the patient and surgical tools), which makes it a single unified scene, calling for augmented reality techniques. It is obviously decreased the risk of a operation.
Virtual reality based technology is a new area in medicine, which growing rapidly. It will revolutionise health care in the foreseeable future. The impact of this technology is just enter people’s vision owing to the technical and manufacturing breakthroughs in the past few years. But we have to say that it is a simply but useful tool.
Reference List
- ChoiMun-hee, VR Techs Applied to Medical Treatment such Psychotherapy, Mock Surgery November 22, 2017. http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=19893
- Robert Riener & Matthias Harders, VR for Medical Training, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-4011-5_8
- Gábor Székely, head and Richard M Satava, professor of surgery, Virtual reality in medicine, Nov 13, 1999.
- Martine J. van Bennekom, Pelle P. de Koning and Damiaan Denys, Virtual Reality Objectifies the Diagnosis of Psychiatric Disorders: A Literature Review, September 05, 2017. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00163/full
- Jason Orlosky, Yuta Itch, Maud Ranchet, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, John Morgan, Hanners Devos, Emulation of Physician Tasks in Eye-Tracked Virtual Reality for Remote Diagnosis of Neurodegenerative Disease. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7829437/
