3D Visualization in Digital Medicine Using XR Technology

Nowadays, virtual reality is a new and rapidly developing technology that provides the opportunity for a new, more immersive form of data visualization. Evaluating digitized pathological serial sections and establishing the appropriate diagnosis is one of the key task of the pathologist in the daily work. The type of tools used by pathologists in the evaluation of samples has not changed much in recent decades. On the other hand, the amount of information required to establish an accurate diagnosis has been significantly increased. Nowadays, pathologists are working with the help of multiple high-resolution desktop monitors. Instead of the large screens, the use of virtual reality can serve as an alternative solution, which provides virtualized working space for pathologists during routine sample evaluation. In our research, we defined a new immersive working environment for pathologists. In our proposed solution we visualize several type of digitized medical image data with the corresponding meta data in 3D, and we also defined virtualized functions that support the evaluation process. The main aim of this paper is to present the new possibilities provided by 3D visualization and virtual reality in digital pathology. The paper presents a new virtual reality-based examination environment, as well as software functionalities that are essential for 3D pathological tissue evaluation.