虚拟现实技术在外科医学教育实践中的应用与探索

Application and exploration of virtual reality technology in surgical practice and medical education

虚拟现实技术是一种将计算机生成的三维场景与用户感官交互的技术,已逐步应用到医学领域。笔者团队自2016年成功尝试3D腹腔镜胃肠手术虚拟现实技术直播以来,经过对虚拟现实技术的应用探索(2016—2017年)和深入研究阶段(2018—2019年)后,如今进入到应用实践阶段(2020年—至今)。随着技术迭代及应用经验的丰富,笔者中心目前的虚拟现实技术应用主要聚焦在面向医学本科生的急性阑尾炎早期接触临床教学场景及面向临床患者术前谈话沟通的临床医疗场景,并取得良好的应用效果。随着软件和硬件方面不断的突破和创新,虚拟现实技术将会应用于更多临床虚拟现实技术场景,课程受众也将拓展到更广泛群体。部分新近热点如元宇宙、ChatGPT等的融入将会弥补虚拟现实技术内容场景和交互性方面的短板,其应用前景拥有无限可能。

Virtual reality(VR)is a technology that interacts computer-generated three-dimensional scenes with the user′s senses and has been gradually applied in the real medical field.Since the first time of successful attempt in 3D laparoscopic gastrointestinal surgery VR living video broadcast in 2016,the authors have experienced the exploration of the application of this technology(2016−2017)as well as the in-depth research phase(2018−2019).Nowadays,the VR application in our center has entered into the application practice phase(2020 to present).With the technology iteration and more and more application experience acquisition,our current VR application mainly focuses on two practice settings,including the clinical teaching scenarios for early exposure to acute appendicitis for medical undergraduate students and the preoperative communication to give patients an early sense of the process in the operating theatre,and has achieved good application results.With continuous breakthroughs and innovations in software and hardware,we believe that more clinical VR scenarios and the course audience will be expanded to a wider group.The integration of some new hotspots such as Meta-Universe and ChatGPT will make up for the shortcomings in VR content scenarios and interactivity,and its application prospects are infinite.