Virtual Reality in Medicine

This book presents a broad survey of technical requirements and design principles for incorporating virtual reality in surgical training, intra-operative augmentation, and rehabilitation that are currently in use as well as techniques now in development.

Virtual Reality has the potential to provide descriptive and practical information for medical training and therapy while relieving the patient or the physician. Multimodal interactions between the user and the virtual environment facilitate the generation of high-fidelity sensory impressions, by using not only visual and auditory, but also kinesthetic, tactile, and even olfactory feedback modalities. On the basis of the existing physiological constraints, Virtual Reality in Medicine derives the technical requirements and design principles of multimodal input devices, displays, and rendering techniques.

Resulting from a course taught by the authors, Virtual Reality in Medicine presents examples for surgical training, intra-operative augmentation, and rehabilitation that are already in use as well as those currently in development. It is well suited as introductory material for engineering and computer science students, as well as researchers who want to learn more about basic technologies in the area of virtual reality applied to medicine. It also provides a broad overview to non-engineering students as well as clinical users, who desire to learn more about the current state of the art and future applications of this technology.

Provides a broad technical basis of different VR display and rendering technologies Includes the newest applications of VR trainers applied to surgery and rehabilitation Perfectly combines technical foundations of VR with medical applications Includes numerous examples of tool-based training simulators Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt

Introduction to Virtual Reality in Medicine.- Input Periphery.- Visual Aspects.- Haptic Aspects.- Auditory Aspects.- Olfactory and Gustatory Aspects.- Virtual Reality for Rehabilitation.- VR for Medical Training.- VR for Planning and Intraoperative Support.- Medical Model Generation.- Soft Tissue Deformation.- Index.