Virtual Reality in Medicine - Many Evolving Uses and Advantages
Virtual reality techniques, involving three-dimensional imaging and surround sound, are increasingly being used in diagnosis, treatment, and medical education. Initial applications of virtual reality in medicine involved visualization of the complex data sets generated by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. A recently available application of these techniques for diagnostic purposes has been the "virtual colonoscopy," in which data from a contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scan is used to make a "fly-through" of the colon. Radiologists then utilize this fly-through for cancer of the colon screening. Recent improvements in methodology have brought the sensitivity and specificity of this technique closer to the degrees of optical colonoscopy, and patients prefer the technique to the traditional method.
Virtual reality has also been used extensively to take care of phobias (for instance a concern with heights, flying and spiders) and post-traumatic stress disorder. This type of therapy has been shown to be effective in the academic setting, and many commercial entities now offer it to patients. In another of my projects utilizing the multi-user virtual reality environment offered by Second Life, one of several easily available online virtual reality environments, we've used a virtual psychosis environment to teach medical students about the auditory and visual hallucinations suffered by patients with schizophrenia.
Virtual reality has been used to supply medical education about healthcare responses to emergencies such as earthquakes, plane crashes and fires. As the primary advantage in phobia treatment is a "protected climate" which patients can explore, the primary advantage in emergency preparedness is simulation of events that are either too rare or too dangerous for effective real-world training. The immersive nature of the virtual reality experience really helps to recreate the sense of urgency or panic associated with these events.
Hop over to this website are also used for a range of medical emergency, mass casualty, and disaster response training sessions for medical and public health professionals. One study developed a protocol for training physicians to take care of victims of chemical-origin mass casualties along with victims of biological agents using simulated patients.
Although it was found that using standardized patients for such training was more realistic, the computer-based simulations afforded many advantages on the live training. These included increased cost effectiveness, the chance to conduct exactly the same training sessions again and again to improve skills, and the ability to use "just-in-time" learning techniques and go through the training session at any time and location, while adjusting the sort and level of expertise required to utilize the training for various emergency response professionals. Others have explored the potential for training emergency responders for major health emergencies using virtual reality. Their objective was to improve contact with life-like emergency situations to improve decision-making and performance and reduce psychological distress in a genuine health emergency.
Experience with recent natural disasters and terrorist acts shows that good communication and coordination between responders is vital to an effective response. In my work using Second Life to develop a virtual mass disaster emergency clinic to hand out antibiotics to the population carrying out a massive anthrax bioterrorism attack, we've found a number of important advantages of the virtual world, on the real life, for training first responders.
Responders to such events come from many different organizations, including fire, police, military, and hospital personnel. You can find three major difficulties in training and evaluating these first responders in real life:
1. They have little if any possiblity to train together before the event occurs and therefore lack teamwork skills.
2. What training they could have had comes at great cost, in large part because of the effort and have to transport so many people to a particular training site at a particular time.
3. Working out sites frequently cannot be the most frequent targets - for example, one cannot shut down the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour to train for an earthquake or terror scenario.
Virtual reality offers some intriguing advantages on the real life for these aspects of first responder training, as all of the above difficulties can be overcome. Virtual reality systems can support multiple simultaneous users, each connecting to the machine using standard office computers and broadband Internet access. Lifelike types of buildings, roads, bridges, and other natural and man-made structures where the users can interact could be constructed.
Finally, the whole scenario can be digitally preserved and a complete workflow analysis can be carried out retrospectively. Public health officials and first-responders could work through the scenarios as many times as they like to familiarize themselves with the workflow and emergency protocols, without encumbering the time and expense of organizing a mock emergency in real life.
Virtual Reality treatments are rapidly becoming more available. They're currently being used to treat post-traumatic stress disorders due to wartime experiences, and US servicemen are now increasingly on offer such programs. As opposed to the traditional approach to confronting old nightmares, online technology has the ability to deliver treatment in an even more therapeutic and humane way. Patients are "transported" to the battlefront and fears and traumas are resolved in virtual place and real time. Virtual Reality is here to stay, and can increasingly be used widely in a number of areas of healthcare.