Immersive medical virtual reality: still a novelty or already a necessity?

Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been explored for medical applications for over half a century. With major tech companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook), HTC and Microsoft investing heavily in the development of VR technologies, significant advancements have recently been made in hardware (eg, standalone headsets), ease of use (eg, gesture tracking) and equipment cost. These advancements helped spur research in the medical field, with over 2700 VR-related articles indexed in PubMed alone in 2022, and the number of VR articles more than tripling in the last 6 years. Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also approved the first VR-based therapy for chronic back pain.1 Whether the technology has reached a tipping point for its use in medicine is debatable, but it seems timely to provide a brief overview of the current state of immersive VR in neurology and related fields. In this editorial, we will...
Source: Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry - Category: Neurosurgery Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research