Matthias Harders – författare

Virtual Reality has the potential to provide descriptive and practical information for medical training and therapy while relieving the patient or the physician. Multimodal interactions between the user and the virtual environment facilitate the generation of high-fidelity sensory impressions, by using not only visual and auditory, but also kinesthetic, tactile, and even olfactory feedback modalities. On the basis of the existing physiological constraints, Virtual Reality in Medicine derives the technical requirements and design principles of multimodal input devices, displays, and rendering techniques.

Resulting from a course taught by the authors, Virtual Reality in Medicine presents examples for surgical training, intra-operative augmentation, and rehabilitation that are already in use as well as those currently in development. It is well suited as introductory material for engineering and computer science students, as well as researchers who want to learn more about basic technologies in the area of virtual reality applied to medicine. It also provides a broad overview to non-engineering students as well as clinical users, who desire to learn more about the current state of the art and future applications of this technology.

One of the most important elements needed for effective training in Virtual Reality (VR) is the generation of variable scenarios. Without this, trainees quickly become familiar with a scene and the natural variations encountered in real-life situations cannot be reproduced. Generating such models in VR-based applications is difficult, but with the increase in computational power (allowing for larger and more finely-detailed virtual environments) there is an increasing demand for improved methods for model acquisition, enhancement, optimization and adaptation.

The field of medicine lends itself very well to VR-based training particularly in the area of surgery. In this book Matthias Harders examines the main components needed when defining effective scenarios:

• scene geometry

• organ appearance

• biomechanical parameters

providing an extensive overview of related work and introducing specific solutions in detail.

With plenty of examples to show the outcome and performance of the methods presented in the book, this will be an essential resource for all those involved in generating training scenarios in medical education, as well as in VR-based training in general.