Principles and Applications of Medical Virtual Environments

The medical domain offers many excellent opportunities for the application of computer graphics, visualization, and virtual environments, offering the potential to help improve healthcare and bring benefits to patients. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in this exciting field. It has been written from the perspective of both computer scientists and practicing clinicians and documents past and current successes together with the challenges that lie ahead. The report begins with a description of the commonly used imaging modalities and then details the software algorithms and hardware that allows visualization of and interaction with this data. Example applications from research projects and commercially available products are listed, including educational tools; diagnostic aids; virtual endoscopy; planning aids; guidance aids; skills training; computer augmented reality; and robotics. The final section of the report summarises the current issues and looks ahead to future developments