Medical

From the Washington Post website: "Diane McFarland injected oranges with shots during nursing school until she felt confident enough to prick human subjects. Then she and her classmates took turns on each other.

Nurses at Inova Loudoun Hospital can now practice on SimMan 3G, a life-size patient simulator in a virtual reality lab that opened Monday on the first floor of the Leesburg facility.

From this Science Daily article: "Telemedicine facilitates communication between family physicians, hospitals and nursing services -- yet current solutions lack flexibility and are consequently very expensive. A new software program is now available that can be tailored to a range of applications.

This Vancouver Sun article reports that "A virtual walk in the park may be just what the doctor ordered for chronic pain sufferers. Simon Fraser University associate professor Diane Gromala claims research shows a 3-D stroll in the forest has the power to help people manage chronic pain, sometimes with better results than traditional means such as morphine.

Gromala, head of SFU's Transforming Pain Research Group, is developing a virtual reality technique called "walking meditation." The technique is one of several programs used around the world to aid sufferers of chronic back pain and migraines.

From the Positive Technology Journal website: "The sensitivity of a virtual reality task to planning and prospective memory impairments: Group differences and the efficacy of periodic alerts on performance."

Neuropsychol Rehabil. 2009 Aug 26;:1-25

"Executive functions have been argued to be the most vulnerable to brain injury. In providing an analogue of everyday situations amenable to control and management virtual reality (VR) may offer better insights into planning deficits consequent upon brain injury.

This Virtalis Press Release is in the form of a case study about the use of a pioneering use of VR for radiotherapy training at Birmingham City University. "2008 saw the national roll out by the Department of Health of a revolutionary approach to radiotherapy training. Called VERT, and drawing on Virtual Reality (VR) technology from Virtalis, it has been successfully installed in 10 universities and dozens of cancer centres all over England. Birmingham City University was a development partner on VERT and one of the first to have the system installed and is now putting the System to far more varied uses than it originally anticipated.

From this Wired Science article: " New pilots train on flight simulators before flying their first 757. Scientists experiment on animals before giving their new drug to patients. And fledgling surgeons perform their first few operations on… real people.

Now, a small but growing group of doctors are trying to make surgical training safer by bringing virtual reality into the operating room, and taking the trial-by-error out.

This Press Release talks about the use of VR in a new research initiative at De Montfort University.

"IN RECENT years, significant resources and research activities worldwide have been invested in the creation of Virtual Reality (VR) environments to train specialised skills for surgeons. Virtalis was one of the first, creating a trainer for minimally invasive therapy. Now, a research team from De Montfort University has begun work on assessing the feasibility for a whole team VR surgical trainer with Virtalis both supplying and designing the VR research platform.

This Science Daily article reports the Nintendo Wii may enhance Parkinson's treatment. From the article: "The Nintendo Wii may help treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease, including depression, a Medical College of Georgia researcher says.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease that impairs motor skills. Dr. Herz theorized that the popular computer game console, which simulates various sports and activities, could improve coordination, reflexes and other movement-related skills, but he found additional benefits as well.

From Positive Technology Journal: "Virtual reality in acquired brain injury upper limb rehabilitation: evidence-based evaluation of clinical research.

Brain Inj 2009 Mar; 23(3):179-91.

Authors: Mumford N, Wilson PH

This BBC News Channel article talks about biomedical models simulating the human body both structurally and functionally. From the article: "Dr Peter Kohl has a big idea for the future of heart surgery. A patient needing an immediate operation will have a scan and in the 45 minutes it takes for blood test results to come back, surgeons will have simulated alternative operations using computer models, and know the best way to proceed. They will have investigated different surgical scenarios in virtual reality and will understand the effects these have on the individual's heart.