Immersive and high-quality VR-based telepresence systems could be of great benefit in the medical field and the operating room (OR) specifically, as they allow distant experts to interact with each other and to assist local doctors as if they were physically present. Despite recent advances in VR technology, and more telepresence systems making use of it, most of the current solutions in use in health care (if any), are just video-based and don’t provide the feeling of presence or spatial awareness, which are highly important for tasks such as remote consultation, -supervision, and -teaching. Reasons still holding back VR telepresence systems are high demands regarding bandwidth and computational power, subpar visualization quality, and complicated setups. We propose an easy-to-set-up telepresence system that enables remote experts to meet in a multi-user virtual operating room, view live-streamed and 3D-visualized operations, interact with each other, and collaboratively explore medical data. Our system is based on Azure Kinect RGB-D cameras, a point cloud streaming pipeline, and fast point cloud rendering methods integrated into a state-of-the-art 3D game engine. Remote experts are visualized via personalized real-time 3D point cloud avatars. For this, we have developed a high-speed/low-latency multi-camera point cloud streaming pipeline including efficient filtering and compression. Furthermore, we have developed splatting-based and mesh-based point cloud rendering solutions and integrated them into the Unreal Engine 4. We conducted two user studies with doctors and medical students to evaluate our proposed system, compare the rendering solutions, and highlight our system’s capabilities.
Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality 1st ed. 2022. Cham : Springer International Publishing, 2022 (2022), Seite 89-110 1 Online-Ressource(XII, 219 p. 72 illus., 60 illus. in color.)
Gesehen am 11.08.2023 ; First published 24 April 2021
In order to improve learning efficiency and memory retention in medical teaching, furthering active learning seems to be an effective alternative to classical teaching. One option to make active exploration of the subject matter possible is the use of virtual reality (VR) technology. The authors developed an immersive anatomy atlas which allows users to explore human anatomical structures interactively through virtual dissection. Thirty-two senior-class students from two German high schools with no prior formal medical training were separated into two groups and tasked with answering an anatomical questionnaire. One group used traditional anatomical textbooks and the other used the immersive virtual reality atlas. The time needed to answer the questions was measured. Several weeks later, the participants answered a similar questionnaire with different anatomical questions in order to test memory retention. The VR group took significantly less time to answer the questionnaire, and participants from the VR group had significantly better results over both tests. Based on the results of this study, VR learning seems to be more efficient and to have better long-term effects for the study of anatomy. The reason for that could lie in the VR environment's high immersion, and the possibility to freely and interactively explore a realistic representation of human anatomy. Immersive VR technology offers many possibilities for medical teaching and training, especially as a support for cadaver dissection courses.
Barbosa, Simone CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts New York,NY,United States : Association for Computing Machinery, 2022 (2022), Artikel-ID 261, Seite 1-7 1 online resource (3066 pages)
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