Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to aid in the understanding of complex volumetric medical images, by providing an immersive and intuitive experience accessible to both experts and non-imaging specialists. A key feature of any clinical image analysis tool is measurement of clinically relevant anatomical structures. However, this feature has been largely neglected in VR applications. The authors propose a Unity-based system to carry out linear measurements on three-dimensional (3D), purposefully designed for the measurement of 3D echocardiographic images. The proposed system is compared to commercially available, widely used image analysis packages that feature both 2D (multi-planar reconstruction) and 3D (volume rendering) measurement tools. The results indicate that the proposed system provides statistically equivalent measurements compared to the reference 2D system, while being more accurate than the commercial 3D system.
Highlights
Over the last 50 years, medical imaging and echocardiography have experienced a tremendous revolution, going from initially acquiring one-dimensional (1D) scan lines, 2D dynamic images, and to current high resolution, high frame-rate 3D real-time images of the heart
In this Letter, we describe a system for making 3D measurements in Virtual reality (VR) for medical image applications, and for 3D echocardiographic images
The contribution of this Letter is twofold: first, we describe the requirements associated to 3D measurements in VR, and propose a Unity solution and implementation; and second, we evaluate the proposed measurement system by comparing it to measurements on the same datasets carried out by clinical experts on commercial clinical systems
Summary
Over the last 50 years, medical imaging and echocardiography have experienced a tremendous revolution, going from initially acquiring one-dimensional (1D) scan lines, 2D dynamic images, and to current high resolution, high frame-rate 3D real-time images of the heart. The advent of 3D display technology, including holography or virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), to cite a few examples, has recently enabled development of immersive applications to visualise and interact with 3D medical data [1]. Most VR medical software allows visualisation of and interaction with 3D surface models that can be extracted from medical images through segmentation [2, 3], or direct rendering of 3D medical images in VR [4, 5], often for advanced surgery planning [6]. Most surgery planning software requires the ability to measure the anatomy, and this feature is largely lacking in existing VR medical applications. In this Letter, we describe a system for making 3D measurements in VR for medical image applications, and for 3D echocardiographic images. The contribution of this Letter is twofold: first, we describe the requirements associated to 3D measurements in VR, and propose a Unity solution and implementation; and second, we evaluate the proposed measurement system by comparing it to measurements on the same datasets carried out by clinical experts on commercial clinical systems
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