HTC Vive MeVisLab integration via OpenVR for medical applications

TL;DR

This paper presents the integration of HTC Vive VR headset into the MeVisLab medical imaging platform using OpenVR, enabling direct and immersive visualization of medical data for applications like surgical planning and training.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel integration of HTC Vive with MeVisLab via OpenVR, facilitating seamless VR visualization of medical data within existing medical imaging workflows.

Findings

Enables direct VR visualization of medical data in MeVisLab.

Simplifies the process of importing medical data into VR environments.

Supports immersive inspection for medical applications.

Abstract

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.