HTC Vive MeVisLab integration via OpenVR for medical applications

Abstract

Virtual Reality, an immersive technology that replicates an environment via computer-simulated reality, gets a lot of attention in the entertainment industry. However, VR has also great potential in other areas, like the medical domain, Examples are intervention planning, training and simulation. This is especially of use in medical operations, where an aesthetic outcome is important, like for facial surgeries. Alas, importing medical data into Virtual Reality devices is not necessarily trivial, in particular, when a direct connection to a proprietary application is desired. Moreover, most researcher do not build their medical applications from scratch, but rather leverage platforms like MeVisLab, MITK, OsiriX or 3D Slicer. These platforms have in common that they use libraries like ITK and VTK, and provide a convenient graphical interface. However, ITK and VTK do not support Virtual Reality directly. In this study, the usage of a Virtual Reality device for medical data under the MeVisLab platform is presented. The OpenVR library is integrated into the MeVisLab platform, allowing a direct and uncomplicated usage of the head mounted display HTC Vive inside the MeVisLab platform. Medical data coming from other MeVisLab modules can directly be connected per drag-and-drop to the Virtual Reality module, rendering the data inside the HTC Vive for immersive virtual reality inspection.

arXiv comment14 pages, 11 figures, 40 references

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• Computer-aided position planning of miniplates to treat facial bone defects
• Client/Server Based Online Environment for Manual Segmentation of Medical Images
• Inspection of histological 3D reconstructions in virtual reality
• Algorithm guided outlining of 105 pancreatic cancer liver metastases in Ultrasound
• In-depth Assessment of an Interactive Graph-based Approach for the Segmentation for Pancreatic Metastasis in Ultrasound Acquisitions of the Liver with two Specialists in Internal Medicine