VR in the Medical field, with Dr. Trudi Qi

Dr. Trudi Qi has focused her career in the research and development of VR/AR technology for Medical related training.

Trudi Qi (P.H.D.)

Her career began working in a Subnational Institute of health project developing VR surgery systems with the main intent to allow surgeons or students to practice surgical procedures without the presence of a real patient.

“The beauty of VR is that we provide and environment and opportunity for them to practice on a virtual patient… … once they get more comfortable and skilled they can move on to a real patient!”

After 6 years developing this technology, Dr Qi has now expanded her research in the medical field working on the implementation of VR in physical therapy.

This latest research project focused on creating a virtual environments in which patients could walk in through the use of a modified treadmill, working on the patient’s mobility and learning to avoid virtual obstacles on their path.

Special treadmill used in this experiment

“The project is being developed in two stages, the first was to create a natural environment and make it as realistic as possible, providing realistic animations for their avatar”

This aspect is particularly important to allow the user to immerse themselves in the virtual environment, interpreting their avatar body as their own.

“Once we get this part done the major phase is training, we want to figure out how well they are doing in terms of walking, based on their mobility and criteria of measurement we can try to predict what obstacles they are able to overcome. When they approach the obstacles in VR they can make realistic reactions to them and we can help them understand when they might want to walk around or over them for instance”.

The use of movement data and the implementation of AI allows this technology to be helpful in both aiding the patient with appropriate obstacles for training and predicting their level of mobility, providing suggestions on how to treat certain obstacles.

“The beauty of VR is that they (the patients) wont have any potential of falling because the obstacles are fake, they could just penetrate the obstacles without issues, while in real life they probably would fall and get hurt. So in VR they are more safe”.

In the interview Dr. Qi focused on the three main aspects that can make VR great, but are also the biggest challenge in it’s development for the medical field.

1. Realism: “Looking good is not enough, if you touch a patient’s body you want to see the deformation, while for games rigid bodies don’t deform in surgery most objects are deformable/soft to mimic human tissue.

2. Computation: “VR has a higher computational demand because you have to render everything twice (for each eye) and everything has to update very quickly, at least at 90fps. For it to feel realistic and not give you motion sickness, or give delay, as delay is a big issue in medical procedures”. This can be particularly challenging when working with soft tissues or moving objects as it further strains the computer’s performance. There must be a balance between realism and computational power.

3. Performance measurement: “… Even in games you have a score, you see how well you performed. Same for surgery, because this is for training you want to evaluate if the person is learning and most importantly you want to make sure the system is actually helping them. You want them to know as they are performing if they are doing good or bad”.

Dr. Qi explains the principal benefits of VR are also the biggest challenges in the development of a well functioning program. Interactivity and realism are challenges that have been in development for years and their development is allowing researchers like Dr. Qi to expand the benefits of this technology in more and more areas, helping people in many new ways.