Emerging Utility of Virtual Reality as a Multidisciplinary Tool in Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Through computer-generated, life-like digital landscapes, VR stands to change the current approach to pain management, medical training, neurocognitive diagnosis, and physical rehabilitation. Additional studies are needed to help define best practices in VR utilization, and to explore new therapeutic uses for VR in clinical practice.

Can hypnosis and virtual reality reduce anxiety, pain and fatigue among patients who undergo cardiac surgery: a randomised controlled trial

“…Techniques such as hypnosis and virtual reality (VR) have been investigated in numerous studies in the medical field (e.g. algology, oncology, anaesthesia) to reduce pain and anxiety and increase patients' comfort [20][21][22]. Hypnosis is defined as a "state of modified consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness, characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestions" [23].…”

“…There has been growing interest in the use of virtual reality (VR) in medicine [20]. VR involves computer-generated, immersive and three-dimensional technologies.…”

“…surgery. VR distraction is an adjunctive tool to clinical interventions for such issues as acute and chronic pain management, clinical education, cognitive and motor rehabilitation, anxiety management and communication skills training; however, less is known about its efficacy in decreasing fatigue [20,52].…”

Multipurpose virtual reality environment for biomedical and health applications

“…Movement correction through rigid-body registration to an initial reference volume, temporal high-pass filtering with a cutoff frequency of 1/200 Hz to remove low frequency drifts in the fMRI time series [38], and voxel efficiency weighting [39] through voxel-wise normalization within a sliding time-window, were applied in real-time to the online data. Voxel-efficiency weighting was performed by normalizing new images based on the mean and standard deviation of the preceding observations in each voxel, according to (3).…”

“…using the VR technology are receiving increasing attention and are becoming increasingly accessible to consumers [1][2]. User studies show that such applications are both effective and intuitive [3][4]. The development of VR has followed a very interesting technological history reliant on a series of independent engineering innovations.…”