Chapter 5 – Medical Applications

Publisher Summary Virtual reality applications for medical use are being developed and tested for a wide variety of tasks. While most applications are still in the development and testing phase, others have already been deployed for production use. Telemedicine is a combination of tele-presence, augmented reality, and virtual reality focused on allowing physicians to diagnose and treat patients at a distance. Telemedicine offers the promise of bringing high-quality doctors into a war zone that may be thousands of miles away. Visualizing complex three-dimensional structures using tools capable of only two-dimensional representations can be a difficult task for many people. Yet many professions require this very feat, and eventually the practitioners learn how to create 3D mental models given the 2D display as presented by 2D tools. Ultrasound is widely used for procedures such as breast biopsies, removing tissue lesions, and localizing lesions prior to biopsy and cyst aspiration.