More medical uses seen for VR

While virtual reality is being put to use to help reduce stress for young patients, Boston Children’s Hospital and other hospitals around the country are eyeing the technology — and others like it — as a key part of the future of medicine.

At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, doctors are studying how using VR could reduce pain, running a series of clinical trials.

“To understand its therapeutic potential requires clinical trials and peer-reviewed research,” said Dr. Brennan Spiegel, who is leading Cedars-Sinai’s VR efforts. “I think it’s truly medically helpful.”

In one of Speigel’s studies, 65 percent of patients using virtual reality experience less pain, compared to 40 percent using conventional video. The average VR patient had a 24 percent reduction in pain, Speigel said.

At Children’s, the real value of virtual reality could be in so-called augmented reality, where images are projected into real life through special glasses, said Melissa Burke, the hospital’s director of operations for the simulator program.

The hospital already makes 3-D printed models of patients’ body parts to help doctors prepare for procedures, and those models could be helpful during surgery.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could provide a hologram of that model, and by blinking their eyes that hologram would come up in their field of view,” Burke said.

“Now you can see the layer where you’re looking at or even the layer you’re cutting and you can actually visualize where you’re going,” she said. “That’s a very powerful tool.”