This document discusses approaches and challenges to immersive visualization in healthcare. It describes several healthcare scenarios that have been explored with immersive virtual reality, including a virtual reality reading room for radiologists and virtual colonoscopy. Evaluation of these approaches found benefits of immersion and freedom of movement but also challenges like limited camera control, disorientation, and nausea. Overall, immersive visualization shows promise for healthcare applications but also needs improvements to interfaces and to address issues like user fatigue and discomfort.
Virtual Reality for Health Applications - siggraph asia 2018
1. Approaches and Challenges to
Immersive Visualization in
Health Care
Joaquim Jorge
Daniel Simões Lopes
INESC-ID & IST / U Lisboa
2. Joaquim Jorge
Instituto Superior Técnico
Universidade de Lisboa
Visualization and Multimodal Interfaces
@ INESC-ID Lisboa
http://web.ist.utl.pt/jorgej
ACM/SIGGRAPH Special Conferences
Committee Chair
Editor Computers & GraphicsResearch Interests:
Calligraphic Interaction,
Multimodal Interfaces,
Graphical Modeling
3. Daniel Simões Lopes
Instituto Superior Técnico
UT Austin / Portugal
Assistant Professor
Heads Biomedical Research Line
PI of project IT-MEDEX
http://web.ist.utl.pt/daniel.s.lopesResearch Interests:
Computational Geometry,
Interactive Computer Graphics,
Computer-Aided Healthcare,
Interactive Visualization
14. VR for Radiologists in the Reading Room
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsNwV4BhJOw
15. VR 4 Radiologists in the Reading ROOM
Evaluation
Radiology Neuroradiology
Gynecology
Surgery Dental Implantology
Obstetrics
Medical Specialities
5 no previous experience in VR
What motivates our work is the need to find more natural ways to interact with the digital content, in particular the one represented here: three-dimensional medical images.
There are many imaging modalities such as CT, MRI, PET, nuclear medicine images ...
Such images are rich in anatomical and physiological information, some modalities have high spatial resolution and high color resolution (CT and MRI).
3D images are everywhere as they can be found in several healthcare scenarios: education, medical illustration, diagnosis, surgery, patient-clinician communication, etc
Three-dimensional images are a bunch of slices, stacked on top of each other forming a parallelepiped, i.e., a volume of images.
Usually, a volume is visualized along the canonical planes (axial, sagittal, coronal plane) leaving the user with the difficult and tedious task to mentally reconstruction the anatomical content in three dimensions.
This cognitive load gives the user a sense of three-dimensionality but ...
... in fact this type of representation, a “Volume Rendering”, helps the user a lot more to grasp the three-dimensional nature of the data.
And if we add AR or VR to the mixture ... the possibilities of interactive visualization are endless!
There are several different scenarios where interactive technologies can make a difference in how we see, manipulate and read 3D images.
The most obvious one is Medical Education. For instance, we can have students around an interactive surface discussing subject-specific content and learning radiologic anatomy.
Another scenario is Radiodiagnostics, where Virtual Reality can have a positive impact on the way radiologists read images.
Believe it or not, a radiologist’s judgment can be seriouly influenced by bad illumination conditions (glare, glitter, glow, ...) and poor ergonomic/posture practices.
Most often they need to constantly adjust lighting conditions, display orientation and position, correct their posture, etc, just to find a more proper setting to read images.
So, we propose a novel approach ….
That is cheaper and more portable than the current ideal reading room
That establishes VR as a tool to attenuate or even cancel out the factors that can cause diagnostic errors
We also contribute with a natural and easy to adopt interaction technique
So, we propose a novel approach ….
That is cheapest and more portable than the current ideal reading room
That establishes VR as a tool to attenuate or even cancel out the factors that can cause diagnostic errors
We also contribute with a natural and easy to adopt interaction technique
6 medical professionals attended our evaluation trials
2 of them radiologists
all of them reported that they use these medical images every day
Only one participant reported experience in VR
Conventional CT Colonography workstations require the expert to be seated at a desk in front of a flat display and interacting with complex radiological data using mouse and keyboard interfaces
Conventional CTC navigation does enables Fly-Through visualization this simulates conventional optical colonoscopy as the camera follows antegrade (rectum→cecum) or retrograde (cecum→rectum) paths.