Virtual reality applications in medicine

Virtual reality (VR) involves computer based generation of three dimensional visual, auditory, and tactile environments, and a set of interface tools that allows users to immerse, navigate, and interact with objects in the computer generated environment. Pursued in the medical community, the first wave of VR development efforts have addressed seven key categories: surgical training and surgical planning; medical education, modeling, and nonsurgical training; anatomically keyed displays with real time data fusion; telesurgery and telemedicine; patient testing and behavioral intervention; rehabilitation, functional movement analysis and ergonomic studies; and disability solutions. The potential of virtual reality through education and information dissemination indicates there will be few areas of medicine not taking advantage of this improved computer interface. However, the latent potential of VR lies in its capacity to be used to manipulate and combine heterogeneous data sets from many sources. This feature is most significant and likely to transform the traditional applications environment in the near future