VEs in Medicine; Medicine in VEs

The first developments in virtual environments (VEs) started in the 2nd century C.E., when the Greek Galen demonstrated the theory of the spatial perception of the left and right eye. That theory was a point of departure for the work by Wheatstone in 1833, to create a breakthrough with his stereoscope. An ingenious system of mirrors presented depth cues to a subject who looked at two perspective drawings. That was before photography was developed. Yet another breakthrough in the long history of VE technology was the demonstration of the experience theater called Sensorama by the American Morton Heilig (mid-1950s). Heilig, a photographer and designer of cameras and projectors in Hollywood, devised a machine to stimulate all human senses. VE techniques were developed worldwide by, among others, Ivan Sutherland and David Evans in the 1960s. Revolutionary developments in computer graphics display hardware and software revolutionized airline safety in the form of real-time interactive flight simulators. The real hype started in 1989, when Jaron Lanier, who is often called the step-father of VEs, generated business from VE technology.

Charles Dotter started experimenting with threading radio-opaque catheters through blood vessels under fluoroscopic-image guidance in the 1960s. Those experiments were a trigger point for the avalanche of minimally invasive imaging procedures emerging today in clinical practice. Dotter was the first to interact and intervene with a patient in an indirect way: He looked at shadow images in stead of the patient. The first step toward medicine in VE was taken.

This chapter advocates the use of VE technologies in the field of medicine to render medical services in a virtual world: to bring medical care to the patient and to improve care by dedicated training and skills building. This chapter begins by highlighting the technologies involved with VE and how these technologies create benefits for the medical community. The second part of the chapter illustrates that the combined efforts of the medical and computer societies have already created real products. However, there is still a lot of effort needed to revolutionize health care.