Virtual Reality in Medicine

Virtual Reality has the potential to provide descriptive and practical information for medical training and therapy while relieving the patient or the physician. Multimodal interactions between the user and the virtual environment facilitate the generation of high-fidelity sensory impressions, by using not only visual and auditory, but also kinesthetic, tactile, and even olfactory feedback modalities. On the basis of the existing physiological constraints, Virtual Reality in Medicine derives the technical requirements and design principles of multimodal input devices, displays, and rendering techniques.

Resulting from a course taught by the authors, Virtual Reality in Medicine presents examples for surgical training, intra-operative augmentation, and rehabilitation that are already in use as well as those currently in development. It is well suited as introductory material for engineering and computer science students, as well as researchers who want to learn more about basic technologies in the area of virtual reality applied to medicine. It also provides a broad overview to non-engineering students as well as clinical users, who desire to learn more about the current state of the art and future applications of this technology.

• Multi-modal User Interface
• Rehabilitation Engineering
• Surgical Simulation
• Virtual Reality

Prof. Grigore Albeanu, Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania

Excerpts from full review posted Oct 23 2012 to Computing Reviews [Review #: CR140617 (1302-0092)]

 …This book offers a complete view of virtual reality in medicine, covering the fundamentals of VR (the first six chapters), applications of VR in medicine (rehabilitation in chapter 7, medical training in chapter 8, and planning and intraoperative support in chapter 9), medical model generation (chapter 10), and soft tissue deformation models (chapter 11).

The book is very well structured, with references in every chapter and a valuable index at the end. High-quality color pictures illustrate the written text.

…Thus, it is mainly useful to students in engineering and computer science, researchers of VR applications, and nonengineering readers who want to find out more about the state of the art and future developments in VR technologies and applications.

I highly recommend this book. It can be viewed as both a handbook on the subject and a reference in the field.

• University Hospital Balgrist, Sensory-Motor Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  Robert Riener

• Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  Matthias Harders

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