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

Virtual reality has also been used extensively to treat phobias (like a fear of heights, flying and spiders) and post-traumatic stress disorder. This sort of therapy has been proven to be effective in the academic setting, and several commercial entities now offer it to patients. In one of my projects utilizing the multi-user virtual reality environment offered by Second Life, one of several common online virtual reality environments, we've used a virtual psychosis environment to teach medical students concerning 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. As the primary advantage in phobia treatment is a "protected climate" which patients can explore, the principal 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 helps to recreate the sense of urgency or panic connected with these events.

Virtual reality programs have also been used for various medical emergency, mass casualty, and disaster response training sessions for medical and public health professionals. One study developed a protocol for training physicians to treat victims of chemical-origin mass casualties in addition to 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 many advantages on the live training. These included increased expense 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 experience the training session at any time 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 improve decision-making and performance and reduce psychological distress in a genuine health emergency.

Click here for info with recent natural disasters and terrorist acts has shown that good communication and coordination between responders is vital to an effective response. In my work using Second Life to build up a virtual mass disaster emergency clinic to hand out antibiotics to the population following a massive anthrax bioterrorism attack, we've found several 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. There are three major difficulties in training and evaluating these first responders in the real world:

1. They have little if any chance to train together prior to the event occurs and therefore lack teamwork skills.
2. What training they could experienced comes at great cost, in large part because of the effort and have 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 typical targets - for instance, 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 over the real world for these aspects 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 computers and broadband Internet access. Lifelike types of buildings, roads, bridges, and other natural and man-made structures where the users can interact can be constructed.

Finally, the whole scenario can be digitally preserved and a complete 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 enough time and expense of organizing a mock emergency in true to life.

Virtual Reality treatments are rapidly becoming more available. They are currently being used to treat post-traumatic stress disorders due to wartime experiences, and US servicemen are actually increasingly on offer such programs. As opposed to the traditional method of confronting old nightmares, online technology is 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 The truth is here to stay, and can increasingly be utilized widely in a number of areas of healthcare.

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