Remote surgery guidance using virtual reality and 360º video
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Amani Taweel (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Regis Kopper
Abstract: There is a strong demand for the use of virtual reality (VR) in healthcare, particularly in surgical procedures. This thesis motivates this need and presents the design and prototype implementation of Virtual Reality Remote Surgery Guidance (VRSG). This tool allows the live connection of a remote specialist surgeon to provide live guidance on surgeries at remote locations, particularly in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs). VRSG also supports an educational experience by offering the ability for users to follow recorded surgeries for practice and review purposes. The main contributions of this work are the feasibility demonstration of the proposed VRSG system through a rigorous 3D user interface design process, the implementation of a prototype VR application that realizes the proposed design, and the usability evaluation that offers evidence towards the effectiveness of the proposed tool. VRSG’s design and implementation can be summarized as follows. The design of an interactive, immersive interface of the remote surgeon connected to the surgery room via an immersive 360º video stream mounted in a strategic location inside the surgery room. Two additional non-immersive streams were added to the interface to show a detailed view of the surgery site and monitor with patient’s vital signs. The remote surgeon offers guidance to the local surgery team by performing annotations directly onto the detailed views, which are transmitted to the surgery room. To simulate the surgery room interface, we created a desktop application that displays the remote surgeon's audio, current point of view, and annotations. All the streaming videos can be saved on the local server in support of the educational element of VRSG. We performed a usability evaluation of VRSG with 6 participants to test the efficiency of the remote surgeon’s user interface. Descriptive statistics show that participants had an overall positive experience with the tool, and qualitative observations pointed to limitations that we discuss and address as recommendations for the evolution of the VRSG. Overall, this thesis achieved its goals through the design, implementation, and usability assessment of a tool to facilitate remote surgery guidance by experts.
Remote surgery guidance using virtual reality and 360º video
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Created on 12/1/2022
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 2022
- Keywords
- 360º Video, Live stream, Remote Surgery Guidance, Unity, Virtual Reality (VR)
- Subjects
- Surgery $x Technological innovations
- Three-dimensional imaging in medicine
- Virtual reality in medicine