Virtual reality techniques, including three dimensional imaging and surround sound, are increasingly used in identification, treatment, and medical instruction. First uses of virtual reality in medicine called for visualization of the complicated data sets created by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Radiologists subsequently use this fly-through for colon cancer screening. Recent developments 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 conventional approach. Yes, really – VR can not only be used for VR Sex Videos 🙂
Virtual reality has additionally been used widely to treat phobias (including a fear of heights, flying and spiders) and post-traumatic stress disorder. Such a treatment was shown to work in the academic setting, and several commercial things now offer it to patients. In one of my jobs using the multiuser virtual reality environment provided by Second Life, among several readily accessible on-line virtual reality environments, we’ve used a virtual psychosis surroundings to educate medical students about the auditory and visual hallucinations suffered by patients with schizophrenia.
Virtual reality was used to supply medical instruction about health care results to crises like earthquakes, plane crashes and fires. While the main edge in phobia treatment is a “safe environment” which patients can research, the main edge in emergency preparedness is simulation of events which might be either too rare or too dangerous for successful real world training.
Virtual reality applications also have been used for many different medical emergency, mass casualty, and disaster response training sessions for medical and public health professionals. One study developed a protocol for training doctors to treat victims of chemical-source mass casualties in addition to sufferers of biological agents using simulated patients.
- These included increased cost effectiveness, the chance to to run precisely the same training sessions again and again to enhance abilities, and the capability to use “just in time” learning techniques and experience the training session anytime and place, while correcting the kind and degree of expertise needed to use the training for various emergency response professionals.
- Others have investigated the possibility of training emergency responders for important health crises using virtual reality.
- Their goal was to raise exposure to lifelike crisis scenarios to enhance decision making and operation and reduce emotional distress in an actual health crisis.
Expertise with recent natural disasters and terrorist acts has demonstrated that great communication and coordination between responders is crucial to an effective answer. Inside my work using Second Life to develop a virtual mass calamity crisis practice to hand out antibiotics to the public following a huge anthrax bioterrorism attack, we’ve found several significant advantages of the virtual universe, over real life, for training first responders.
Responders to such occasions come from a variety of organizations, including fire, police, military, and hospital staff. You’ll find three significant issues in training and assessing these first responders in the real world:
1. They’ve little or no chance to train together before the event happens and therefore lack teamwork abilities.
2. What training they may have had comes at great price, in big part because of the attempt and demand to transport so a lot of people to some particular training website at a particular time.
3. Lifelike models of buildings, roads, bridges, and other natural and manmade constructions where the users can interact can be built.
Eventually, the complete scenario can be digitally maintained and a complete workflow evaluation can be performed retrospectively. Virtual Reality treatments are fast becoming more accessible. They have been now used to treat post-traumatic stress disorders brought on by wartime experiences, and US servicemen are actually increasingly being offered such applications. Rather as opposed to conventional approach to facing old nightmares, on-line technology can deliver treatment in a much more healing and humanist manner. Patients are “carried” to the battlefront and anxieties and injuries are worked out in virtual location and real time. Virtual Reality is here to remain, and will increasingly be used extensively in numerous areas of health care.