Researchers from King's College London have created a new interactive virtual reality system.
Conducting an MRI is not always easy for children and people withcognitive disorders, such as claustrophobia or anxiety. A person is afraid that he will need to spend some time motionless in a closed space, and besides, the device makes noise. Under normal circumstances, MRI scans fail in 50% of children under 5 years of age; hospitals use sedation or even anesthesia to perform the procedure.
Use such serious drugs onexpensive and not always safe on a regular basis. From a neuroscience perspective, this also means that MRIs are performed in a state of artificial sleep, so the results of the study may not reflect how the brain works under normal conditions.
Our interest in virtual reality in particulararose from a simple observation - when someone is immersed in a virtual environment, he is completely unaware of what surrounds him. We thought that if we could make the system compatible with the MRI environment, it would help to scan more often and more successfully.
Kun Qian, Fellow, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King's College London
Researchers have developed a dedicated virtual reality headset that can be safely used inside an MRI scanner.
The headset is lightproof, so the userdoesn't see what's going on around him at all. Researchers note that it effectively masks sensations while inside an MRI scanner. One of the main novelties of this system is that users can interact with the virtual world with one glance: this way they can avoid unnecessary movements when scanning.
Currently, there are no other similar VR-compatible systems.
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