Virtual reality for the observation of oncology models (VROOM): immersive analytics for oncology patient cohorts.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lau CW
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9256599 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Children must often endure painful procedures as part of their treatment for various medical conditions. Those with chronic pain endure frequent or constant discomfort in their daily lives, sometimes severely limiting their physical capacities. With the advent of affordable consumer-grade equipment, clinicians have access to a promising and engaging intervention for pediatric pain, both acute and chronic. In addition to providing relief from acute and procedural pain, virtual reality (VR) may also help to provide a corrective psychological and physiological environment to facilitate rehabilitation for pediatric patients suffering from chronic pain. The special qualities of VR such as presence, interactivity, customization, social interaction, and embodiment allow it to be accepted by children and adolescents and incorporated successfully into their existing medical therapies. However, the powerful and transformative nature of many VR experiences may also pose some risks and should be utilized with caution. In this paper, we review recent literature in pediatric virtual reality for procedural pain and anxiety, acute and chronic pain, and some rehabilitation applications. We also discuss the practical considerations of using VR in pediatric care, and offer specific suggestions and information for clinicians wishing to adopt these engaging therapies into their daily clinical practice.
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Project description:Background. Immersive virtual reality (iVR) facilitates surgical decision-making by enabling surgeons to interact with complex anatomic structures in realistic 3-dimensional environments. With emerging interest in its applications, its effects on patients and providers should be clarified. This systematic review examines the current literature on iVR for patient-specific preoperative planning. Materials and Methods. A literature search was performed on five databases for publications from January 1, 2000 through March 21, 2021. Primary studies on the use of iVR simulators by surgeons at any level of training for patient-specific preoperative planning were eligible. Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts, and full texts, extracted data, and assessed quality using the Quality Assessment Tool for Studies with Diverse Designs (QATSDD). Results were qualitatively synthesized, and descriptive statistics were calculated. Results. The systematic search yielded 2,555 studies in total, with 24 full-texts subsequently included for qualitative synthesis, representing 264 medical personnel and 460 patients. Neurosurgery was the most frequently represented discipline (10/24; 42%). Preoperative iVR did not significantly improve patient-specific outcomes of operative time, blood loss, complications, and length of stay, but may decrease fluoroscopy time. In contrast, iVR improved surgeon-specific outcomes of surgical strategy, anatomy visualization, and confidence. Validity, reliability, and feasibility of patient-specific iVR models were assessed. The mean QATSDD score of included studies was 32.9%. Conclusions. Immersive VR improves surgeon experiences of preoperative planning, with minimal evidence for impact on short-term patient outcomes. Future work should focus on high-quality studies investigating long-term patient outcomes, and utility of preoperative iVR for trainees.
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Project description:BackgroundProcedural anxiety in children undergoing radiation therapy (RT) is common and is associated with poor procedural compliance and an increased used of general anaesthesia (GA). There is emerging evidence that Virtual Reality (VR) technology may reduce medical procedural distress through realistic and educative exposure to actual procedures via virtual simulation.ObjectiveTo examine the feasibility, acceptability and efficacy of an Immersive VR exposure intervention aimed at reducing anxiety and enhancing preparedness for pediatric patients undergoing radiation therapy, and their parents.MethodA convenience sample of patients (6-18 years) scheduled for RT, and their parent caregivers, were recruited consecutively over a 14-month period. Patients were exposed to a virtual simulation of both CT Simulation (Phase 1) and RT (Phase 2), prior to these procedures occurring. Pre-and-post VR intervention measures (anxiety, health literacy) were administered across multiple time points. GA requirement following VR intervention was also recorded.ResultsThirty children and adolescents were recruited (88% participation rate). High VR acceptability and satisfaction was reported by patients, parents and radiation therapists. There were minimal adverse effects associated with VR. The VR intervention was found to improve children's understanding of the RT procedures (health literacy) and lower pre-procedural child and parental anxiety. Only one child in the study required GA (3.33%).ConclusionsThis study provides novel and preliminary support for utilizing VR to prepare children and families for RT. Subsequent implementation of VR into routine paediatric RT has the potential to improve clinical and operational outcomes.
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Project description:Synchronising movements in time with others can have significant positive effects on affiliative attitudes and behaviors. To explore the generalizability of synchrony effects, and to eliminate confounds of suggestion, competence and shared intention typical of standard laboratory and field experiments, we used an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Participants, represented as virtual humans, took part in a joint movement activity with two other programmed virtual humans. The timings of the co-participant characters' movements were covertly manipulated to achieve synchrony or non-synchrony with the focal participant. Participants in the synchrony condition reported significantly greater social closeness to their virtual co-participants than those in the non-synchrony condition. Results indicate that synchrony in joint action causes positive social effects and that these effects are robust in a VR setting. The research can potentially inform the development of VR interventions for social and psychological wellbeing.
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Project description:Avoidance behavior is a key symptom of most anxiety disorders and a central readout in animal research. However, the quantification of real-life avoidance behavior in humans is typically restricted to clinical populations, who show actual avoidance of phobic objects. In experimental approaches for healthy participants, many avoidance tasks utilize button responses or a joystick navigation on the screen as indicators of avoidance behavior. To allow the ecologically valid assessment of avoidance behavior in healthy participants, we developed a new automated immersive Virtual Reality paradigm, where participants could freely navigate in virtual 3-dimensional, 360-degrees scenes by real naturalistic body movements. A differential fear conditioning procedure was followed by three newly developed behavioral tasks to assess participants' avoidance behavior of the conditioned stimuli: an approach, a forced-choice, and a search task. They varied in instructions, degrees of freedom, and high or low task-related relevance of the stimuli. We initially examined the tasks in a quasi-experiment (N = 55), with four consecutive runs and various experimental adaptations. Here, although we observed avoidance behavior in all three tasks after additional reinforcement, we only detected fear-conditioned avoidance behavior in the behavioral forced-choice and search tasks. These findings were largely replicated in a confirmatory experiment (N = 72) with randomized group allocation, except that fear-conditioned avoidance behavior was only manifest in the behavioral search task. This supports the notion that the behavioral search task is sensitive to detect avoidance behavior after fear conditioning only, whereas the behavioral approach and forced-choice tasks are still able to detect "strong" avoidance behavior after fear conditioning and additional reinforcement.
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Project description:Advances in the application of electron microscopy (EM) to serial imaging are opening doors to new ways of analyzing cellular structure. New and improved algorithms and workflows for manual and semiautomated segmentation allow us to observe the spatial arrangement of the smallest cellular features with unprecedented detail in full three-dimensions. From larger samples, higher complexity models can be generated; however, they pose new challenges to data management and analysis. Here we review some currently available solutions and present our approach in detail. We use the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) environment CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment), a room in which we are able to project a cellular reconstruction and visualize in 3D, to step into a world created with Blender, a free, fully customizable 3D modeling software with NeuroMorph plug-ins for visualization and analysis of EM preparations of brain tissue. Our workflow allows for full and fast reconstructions of volumes of brain neuropil using ilastik, a software tool for semiautomated segmentation of EM stacks. With this visualization environment, we can walk into the model containing neuronal and astrocytic processes to study the spatial distribution of glycogen granules, a major energy source that is selectively stored in astrocytes. The use of CAVE was key to the observation of a nonrandom distribution of glycogen, and led us to develop tools to quantitatively analyze glycogen clustering and proximity to other subcellular features.
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Project description:Memory decline associated with physiological aging and age-related neurological disorders has a direct impact on quality of life for seniors. With demographic aging, the assessment of cognitive functions is gaining importance, as early diagnosis can lead to more effective cognitive interventions. In comparison to classic paper-and-pencil approaches, virtual reality (VR) could offer an ecologically valid environment for assessment and remediation of cognitive deficits. Despite the rapid development and application of new technologies, the results of studies aimed at the role of VR immersion in assessing cognitive performance and the use of VR in aging populations are often ambiguous. VR can be presented in a less immersive form, with a desktop platform, or with more advanced technologies like head-mounted displays (HMDs). Both these VR platforms are associated with certain advantages and disadvantages. In this study, we investigated age-related differences related to the use of desktop and HMD platforms during memory assessment using an intra-subject design. Groups of seniors (N = 36) and young adults (N = 25) completed a virtual Supermarket Shopping task using desktop and HMD platforms in a counterbalanced order. Our results show that the senior performances were superior when using the non-immersive desktop platform. The ability to recall a shopping list in the young adult group remained stable regardless of the platform used. With the HMD platform, the performance of the subjects of both groups seemed to be more influenced by fatigue. The evaluated user experiences did not differ between the two platforms, and only minimal and rare side effects were reported by seniors. This implies that highly immersive technology has good acceptance among aging adults. These findings might have implications for the further use of HMD in cognitive assessment and remediation.
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Project description:An important issue of psychological research is how experiments conducted in the laboratory or theories based on such experiments relate to human performance in daily life. Immersive virtual reality (VR) allows control over stimuli and conditions at increased ecological validity. The goal of the present study was to accomplish a transfer of traditional paradigms that assess attention and distraction to immersive VR. To further increase ecological validity we explored attentional effects with daily objects as stimuli instead of simple letters. Participants searched for a target among distractors on the countertop of a virtual kitchen. Target-distractor discriminability was varied and the displays were accompanied by a peripheral flanker that was congruent or incongruent to the target. Reaction time was slower when target-distractor discriminability was low and when flankers were incongruent. The results were replicated in a second experiment in which stimuli were presented on a computer screen in two dimensions. The study demonstrates the successful translation of traditional paradigms and manipulations into immersive VR and lays a foundation for future research on attention and distraction in VR. Further, we provide an outline for future studies that should use features of VR that are not available in traditional laboratory research.
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Project description:We typically experience the world from a first-person perspective (1PP) but can sometimes experience events from a third-person perspective (3PP) much as an observer might see us. Little is known about how visual perspective influences the formation of memories for events. We developed an immersive virtual reality paradigm to examine how visual perspective during encoding influences memories. Across two studies, participants explored immersive virtual environments from first-person and third-person avatar perspectives while wearing an Oculus Rift headset. Memory was tested immediately (Study One and Study Two) and following a one-week delay (Study Two). We assessed the accuracy of visual memory using cued recall questions and spatial memory by asking participants to draw maps of the layout of each environment (Study One and Study Two). Additional phenomenological ratings were included to assess visual perspective during remembering (Study Two). There were no differences in the accuracy of visual information across the two studies, but 3PP experiences were found to increase spatial memory accuracy due to their wider camera field of view when compared to 1PP experiences. Our results also demonstrate that 3PP experiences create 3PP memories, as reflected by an increase in subjective ratings of observer-like perspectives during remembering. In sum, visual perspective during memory formation influences the accuracy of spatial but not visual information, and the vantage point of memories during remembering.
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Project description:Head-mounted displays enable social interactions in immersive virtual environments. However, it is yet unclear whether the technology is also suitable for collaborative work between remote group members. Previous research comparing group performance in nonimmersive computer-mediated communication and face-to-face (FtF) interaction yielded inconsistent results. For this reason, we set out to compare multi-user immersive virtual reality (IVR), video conferencing (VC), and FtF interaction in a group decision task. Furthermore, we examined whether the conditions differed with respect to cognitive load and social presence. Using the hidden profile paradigm, we tested 174 participants in a fictional personnel selection case. Discussion quality in IVR did not differ from VC and FtF interaction. All conditions showed the typical bias for discussing information that was provided for all participants (i.e., shared information) compared with information that was only disclosed to individual participants (i.e., unshared information). Furthermore, we found that IVR groups showed the same probability of solving the task correctly. Social presence in IVR was reduced compared with FtF interaction; however, we found no differences in cognitive load. In sum, our results imply that IVR can effectuate efficient group behavior in a modern working environment that is characterized by a growing demand for remote collaboration.
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