Development and evaluation of an immersive virtual reality system for medical imaging of the ear

摘要

Immersive, stereoscopic displays may be instrumental to better interpreting 3-dimensional (3D) data. Further-more, the advent of commodity-level virtual reality (VR) hardware has made this technology accessible formeaningful applications, such as medical education. Accordingly, in the current work we present a commodity-level, immersive simulation for interacting with human ear anatomy. In the simulation, users may interactsimultaneously with high resolution computed tomography (CT) scans and their corresponding, 3D anatomicalstructures. The simulation includes: (1) a commodity level, immersive virtual environment presented by theOculus CV1, (2) segmented 3D models of head and ear structures generated from a CT dataset, (3) the abilityto freely manipulate 2D and 3D data synchronously, and (4) a user-interface which allows for free explorationand manipulation of data using the Oculus touch controllers. The system was demonstrated to 10 otolaryngolo-gists for evaluation. Physicians were asked to supply feedback via both questionnaire and discussion in order todetermine the efficacy of the current system as well as the most pertinent applications for future research.