3D Virtual Reality vs. 2D Desktop Registration User Interface Comparison

TL;DR

This study compares 3D VR and 2D desktop interfaces for tissue registration tasks, finding VR setups improve speed and rotation accuracy but not position accuracy, based on a user study with 42 participants.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates VR-based registration interfaces, demonstrating their advantages over traditional 2D interfaces in surgical tissue registration tasks.

Findings

VR interfaces are about three times faster than 2D desktop.

VR users have approximately one-third better rotation accuracy.

No significant difference in position accuracy across setups.

Abstract

Working with organs and extracted tissue blocks is an essential task in surgery and anatomy environments. To prepare specimens from human donors for analysis, wet-bench workers must dissect human tissue and collect metadata for downstream analysis, including information about the spatial origin of tissue. The Registration User Interface (RUI) was developed to allow stakeholders in the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) to register tissue blocks, i.e., to record the size, position, and orientation of human tissue data with regard to reference organs. In this paper, we compare three setups for registering one 3D tissue block object to another 3D reference organ (target) object. The first setup is a 2D Desktop implementation featuring a traditional screen, mouse, and keyboard interface. The remaining setups are both virtual reality (VR) versions of the RUI: VR Tabletop, where users sit at a physical desk which is replicated in virtual space; VR Standup, where users stand upright while performing their tasks. We then ran a user study for these three setups involving 42 human subjects completing 14 increasingly difficult and then 30 identical tasks in sequence and reporting position accuracy, rotation accuracy, completion time, and satisfaction. While VR Tabletop and VR Standup users are about three times as fast and about a third more accurate in terms of rotation than 2D Desktop users (for the sequence of 30 identical tasks), there are no significant differences between the three setups for position accuracy when normalized by the height of the virtual kidney across setups.