Virtual Reality in Medicine - Many Evolving Uses and Advantages
Virtual reality techniques, involving three-dimensional imaging and surround sound, are increasingly 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 approaches for diagnostic purposes has been the "virtual colonoscopy," where data from the contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scan can be used to make a "fly-through" of the colon. Radiologists then use this fly-through for cancer of the colon screening. https://www.adventure-vault.com/deerfield-beach/virtual-reality in methodology have brought the sensitivity and specificity of the technique closer to the levels of optical colonoscopy, and patients choose the technique to the traditional method.
Virtual reality in addition has been used extensively to treat phobias (for instance a fear of heights, flying and spiders) and post-traumatic stress disorder. This sort 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 using the multi-user virtual reality environment provided 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 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 a "safe environment" which patients can explore, the primary advantage in emergency preparedness is simulation of events which 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.
Virtual reality programs are also used for a number of medical emergency, mass casualty, and disaster response training sessions for medical and public medical researchers. One study developed a protocol for training physicians to take care of victims of chemical-origin mass casualties and also victims of biological agents using simulated patients.
Although it was discovered that using standardized patients for such training was more realistic, the computer-based simulations afforded several advantages over the live training. These included increased expense effectiveness, the opportunity 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 anytime and location, while adjusting the sort and degree 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 boost 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 at hand out antibiotics to the populace carrying out a massive anthrax bioterrorism attack, we have found many important benefits of the virtual world, over the real life, for training first responders.
Responders to such events come 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 the real world:
1. They have little or no possiblity to train together prior to the event occurs and therefore lack teamwork skills.
2. What training they may experienced comes at great cost, in large part because of the effort and need to transport so many people to a specific training site at a particular time.
3. Working out sites frequently can't be the most frequent targets - for example, one cannot turn off the Golden Gate Bridge during rush hour to teach for an earthquake or terror scenario.
Virtual reality offers some intriguing advantages over the real life for these areas of first responder training, as all 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 Access to the internet. Lifelike types of buildings, roads, bridges, and other natural and man-made structures where the users can interact could be constructed.
Finally, the complete 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 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 true to life.
Virtual Reality treatments are rapidly becoming more available. They're currently being used to take care of post-traumatic stress disorders due to wartime experiences, and US servicemen are now increasingly on offer such programs. As opposed to the traditional method of confronting old nightmares, online technology can 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 utilized widely in several areas of healthcare.