Virtual Reality Improves Clinical Assessment of the Optic Nerve

Abstract

The most common approach to assessing the optic nerve head (ONH) in the detection and management of glaucoma relies on frontal stereoscopic images acquired by a fundus camera. Subjective clinical assessment of ONH parameters from these images (e.g., cup/disc ratio and cup depth) is limited by the absence of monocular perspective cues normally available in oblique viewing. This study examined whether viewing a rotatable 3D reconstruction of the ONH could improve the accuracy of subjective assessments by increasing linear perspective information. Images were reconstructed from optical coherence tomography (OCT) of the ONH. Trained optometry students assessed the cup/disc (C/D) ratio of ONHs with either a flat stereoscopic display or virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) with or without dynamic slant control. Dynamic stereoscopic assessment of optic nerve head models in VR resulted in larger estimates of C/D ratio and cup depth compared to static stereoscopic assessments. A follow-up experiment using an external display revealed that relative to static monoscopic viewing, adding either dynamic viewing or stereoscopic viewing to the same display improved subjective estimates of C/D ratio relative to Cirrus HD-OCT defined objective values of C/D ratio. The findings suggest that simply changing the viewing orientation of ONH models improves clinical evaluation of C/D ratio by generating perspective cues to depth without the need for stereo viewing.

Cybersickness in Head-Mounted Displays Is Caused by Differences in the User's Virtual and Physical Head Pose

“…The promise of this revolutionary technology can clearly be seen by the host of applications already developed for its use (e.g., in SteamVR, Oculus and Viveport). To date, HMD VR applications have been created for advertising, archaeology, architecture, business, clinical psychology, defense, design, education, engineering, entertainment and the arts, health and safety, gaming, manufacturing, medicine, real estate, research, simulation training, sport, social media, telecommunications, tourism, and urban design (e.g., Tate et al, 1997;Hogue et al, 1999;Blascovich et al, 2002;Simons and Melzer, 2003;Mujber et al, 2004;Villani et al, 2007;Ch'ng, 2009;Phan and Choo, 2010;Wiederhold et al, 2014;Gonizzi Barsanti et al, 2015;Grabowski and Jankowski, 2015;Elliman et al, 2016;Eubanks et al, 2016;Khor et al, 2016;Ortegon-Sarmiento et al, 2016;Bernardo, 2017;Andersen and Popescu, 2018;Jensen and Konradsen, 2018;Pot-Kolder et al, 2018;Han and Cho, 2019;Yildirim, 2019a,b;Chen et al, 2020).…”

New Approach to Accelerated Image Annotation by Leveraging Virtual Reality and Cloud Computing

“…With VR, the perception of 3D structures in complex data (e.g., EM images) is enhanced, and measurements are performed quicker than in standard 2D stack viewers. Examples of advantages in 3D perception of VR are found for histological sample examination ( Lobachev et al, 2021 ), surgery simulation or planning ( Seymour, 2008 ; Guerriero et al, 2018 ; Thomsen et al, 2017 ; Chen et al, 2020 ), motion or gaze precision ( Martirosov et al, 2021 ; Pastel et al, 2021 ), and 3D data labeling prior to machine learning training ( Ramirez et al, 2020 ). Medical experts and undergraduate students have reported better visualization of 3D anatomical structures in VR using DIVA, when compared with typical 3D renderings, see Table 1 in Bouaoud et al (2020) and Raimondi et al (2021) .…”

Effects of Linear Visual-Vestibular Conflict on Presence, Perceived Scene Stability and Cybersickness in the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest

“…Over the past decade, we have seen a rapidly expanding consumer uptake of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for virtual reality (VR) in numerous applications. These applications have included education (Polcar and Horejsi, 2015), entertainment (Roettl and Terlutter, 2018), telehealth (Riva and Gamberini, 2000), anatomy and diagnostic medicine (Jang et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2020). The recent success of consumer-grade HMDs for VR is not only attributed to their increasing affordability, but also to their operational enhancements (e.g., larger field of view, relatively low system latency).…”