Future imperfect
BMJ 2005; 330 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0503116 (Published 01 March 2005) Cite this as: BMJ 2005;330:0503116- Sukhmeet S Panesar, fifth year medical student1,
- Anish N Shah, final year medical student1,
- Iain Mckay-Davies, final year medical student1
- 1Imperial College London
The year is 2020 and Mrs Barrymore lies on the operating table, awaiting her laparoscopic cholecystectomy. She was initially concerned that Mr Stewart is only in his first year of specialist training, but he reminds her that he has performed over 50 virtual reality (VR) laparoscopic cholecystectomies on the department's VR simulator, with a success rate of over 95%. The patient is not particularly clear on the meaning of all this; VR vaguely reminds her of a movie, The Matrix, which she saw two decades ago.
From cockpit to theatre
Virtual reality (VR) is a way for humans to visualise, manipulate, and interact with extremely complex data. Originally born out of the need to familiarise pilots with an aeroplane's instrumentation in the 1930s, as a form of mechanical flight simulation, virtual reality has followed a path of rapid technological development, with the major advances in digital simulation taking place since the 1980s. These have included everything from space flight simulators designed by NASA, to Fish Tank VR (a small virtual environment displayed on a computer monitor that tracks your head movements and shifts the angle of view and perspective accordingly).
However, the idea of applying it to medicine was developed about 15 years ago, by groups at the University of North Carolina and the US Department of Defense, who envisaged surgeons rehearsing complicated procedures using VR headsets.1
Unlike pure three dimensional visualisation, VR employs haptics. Robotic arms convey the relative sensations of pressure and force back to …
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