From: prothero@hitl.washington.edu
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: APPS: VR and Medicine?
Date: 1 Jan 93 00:13:42 GMT
Article-I.D.: shelley.1i0jnmINNr70
Organization: University of Washington
NNTP-Posting-Host: stein.u.washington.edu
Originator: hlab@stein.u.washington.edu



> Do any of you know of currently/soon/maybe feasible applications for
> VR in the field of clinical/research medicine/surgery?

Besides the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality proceedings, I would also
point to the bibliography in 

        lhc.nlm.nih.gov  /pub/ai-medicine/Biblio/virtual-reality-list

which I believe was provided by Serdar Uckun at Vanderbilt.

When I wrote a term paper on medicine & VR about a year ago, I found
the following papers useful.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Pieper, S., Zeltzer, D., Rosen, J., "Interactive Computer Graphics in
Surgical Simulation", Proceedings of NICOGRAPH 1991, Tokyo, Japan,
November, 1991.
[There is also an extended version of this paper, Pieper, S., Chen, D.,
Delp, S., McKenna, M., Zeltzer, D., Rosen, J.M., "Surgical Simulation:
>From Computer-Aided Design to Computer-Aided Surgery".  The extended
version was kindly provided to me by Joe Rosen.  I don't know if it
has been published.]

Rosenman, J., Sailer, S.L., Sherouse, G.W., Chaney, E.L., Tepper,
J.E., "Virtual Simulation: Initial Clinical Results", Int. J.
Radiation Oncology Biol. Phys., April 1991, Vol. 20, Number 4, pp.
843-851.

Sherouse, G.W., Bourland, J.D., Reynolds, K., McMurray, H.L.,
Mitchell, T.P., Chaney, E.L., "Virtual Simulation in the Clincal
Setting: Some Practical Considerations", Int. J. Radiation Oncology
Biol. Phys., Oct. 1990, Vol. 19, Number 4, pp. 1059-1065.

Sherouse, G.W., Chaney, E.L., "The Portable Virtual Simulator", Int.
J. Radiation Oncology Biol. Phys., July 1990, Vol. 21, Number 2, pp.
475-482.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

I believe Rosen is working with VPL on a surgical simulator, but
unfortunately I know nothing about it.

In conjunction with Orbis International, the Human Interface
Technology Laboratory has a project going which is aimed at teaching a
particular eye surgery technique (phacoemulsification).  However, the
primary emphasis is on stored 3D video images, rather than interactive
VR.  (My master's thesis is tied in with this project.)

If you are willing to expand your scope to telepresence & medicine, I
would point to the work of International Telepresence in Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada.  I.T. has developed a system for performing
non-invasive surgery in which the surgeon is provided with a 3D image
of the tissues s/he is working with, via a stereoscopic display.

I'm committed to performing a serious literature search on VR &
medicine as part of my master's thesis.  If there's interest, I would
be happy to provide the results via an anonymous ftp site.  For best
results, however, I need help from the net.  So...

If you have ongoing projects involving medicine & VR which you are willing
to describe, or know of relevant articles which have been published
recently (ideally available via ftp :) please let me know.  All assistance
will be acknowledged, of course...

Jerry Prothero
prothero@hitl.washington.edu


--- End of forwarded message from <prothero@hitl.washington.edu>