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," where data from a contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scan is used to create a "fly-through" of the colon. Radiologists then use this fly-through for cancer of the colon screening. Recent improvements in methodology have brought the sensitivity and specificity of the technique nearer to the degrees of optical colonoscopy, and patients choose the technique to the original method.

Virtual reality has also been used extensively to take care of phobias (such as a concern with heights, flying and spiders) and post-traumatic stress disorder. This type of therapy has been shown to work in the academic setting, and several commercial entities now offer it to patients. In one of my projects using the multi-user virtual reality environment offered by Second Life, one of several easily available online virtual reality environments, we have used a virtual psychosis environment to teach medical students about the auditory and visual hallucinations suffered by patients with schizophrenia.

Virtual Reality Arcade Near Me  has been used to provide medical education about healthcare responses to emergencies such as earthquakes, plane crashes and fires. While the primary advantage in phobia treatment is really a "protected climate" which patients can explore, the principal 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 helps to recreate the sense of urgency or panic connected with these events.

Virtual reality programs are also used for various medical emergency, mass casualty, and disaster response workout sessions for medical and public medical researchers. One study developed a protocol for training physicians to treat victims of chemical-origin mass casualties together 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 a number of advantages over the live training. These included increased cost effectiveness, the opportunity to conduct 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 anytime 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 increase exposure to life-like emergency situations to improve decision-making and performance and reduce psychological distress in a real 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 at hand out antibiotics to the populace following a massive anthrax bioterrorism attack, we've found numerous important advantages of the virtual world, on the real world, for training first responders.

Responders to such events result from a variety of organizations, including fire, police, military, and hospital personnel. There are three major difficulties in training and evaluating these first responders in real life:

1. They have little or no chance to train together prior to the event occurs and hence lack teamwork skills.
2. What training they could experienced comes at great cost, in large part due to the effort and need to transport a lot of people to a particular training site at a particular time.
3. Working out sites frequently can't be the most frequent targets - for instance, one cannot shut down the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour to teach for an earthquake or terror scenario.

Virtual reality offers some intriguing advantages over the real world for these areas of first responder training, as each of the above difficulties could be overcome. Virtual reality systems can support multiple simultaneous users, each connecting to the machine using standard office personal computers and broadband Internet access. Lifelike types of buildings, roads, bridges, along with other natural and man-made structures where in fact the users can interact could be constructed.

Finally, the whole scenario could be digitally preserved and a full workflow analysis can be performed retrospectively. Public health officials and first-responders can work through the scenarios as much times as they prefer to familiarize themselves with the workflow and emergency protocols, without encumbering the time and expense of organizing a mock emergency in real life.

Best VR  are rapidly becoming more available. They're currently being used to treat post-traumatic stress disorders caused by wartime experiences, and US servicemen are now increasingly being offered such programs. Rather than the traditional method of confronting old nightmares, online technology will be able 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 will increasingly be used widely in a number of areas of healthcare.