TY - JOUR
T1 - HTC Vive MeVisLab integration via OpenVR for medical applications
AU - Egger, Jan
AU - Gall, Markus
AU - Wallner, Jürgen
AU - Boechat, Pedro
AU - Hann, Alexander
AU - Li, Xing
AU - Chen, Xiaojun
AU - Schmalstieg, Dieter
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Computer Graphics
KW - Computer Simulation
KW - Computer Systems
KW - Equipment Design
KW - Feasibility Studies
KW - Humans
KW - Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
KW - Imaging, Three-Dimensional
KW - Software
KW - User-Computer Interface
KW - Evaluation Studies
KW - Journal Article
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0173972
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0173972
M3 - Article
C2 - 28323840
VL - 12
SP - e0173972
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 3
ER -