Analyzing and visualizing complex and multi-input medical data, Intracranial Electroencephalograms (iEEG) and Magnetic Resonance Imagining (MRI), on standard desktop monitors is very cognitively demanding. 

Historically, the approach to visualize epileptic brains requires translating multi-dimensional iEEG and MRI data into a two-dimensional space, a task that is often a rate limiting factor for patient evaluation. This patient evaluation process is integral in determining where the seizure onset zone is and whether a patient is a candidate for surgery.  

More recently, literature has suggested the possibility for Virtual Reality (VR) to interact with 4D visualizations of patient data to reduce cognitive load (Aminolroaya, 2023). Using VR alone to tackle this complex patient data is not a realistic solution for many factors. There is sometimes difficulty doing precise interactions with the virtual objects and hardware limitations often create readability issues compared with reading text in the real environment (Wang et al., 2023). VR would also require a system to completely recreate the software neurologists currently use that has been developed over decades, which doctors are already highly trained on. 

In collaboration with Neurologists at the Foothills Medical Center in Calgary, our research aims to streamline the pre-surgical workflow and evaluation of patients with epilepsy using cross reality (CR). CR allows users to work with their traditional desktop software in a real-world environment while simultaneously allowing access to a mixed reality environment with augmented tools. It is our hope that our CR prototype and its use in neurology tasks will serve as a springboard for other CR applications in medicine where the efficient and accurate evaluation of iEEG and/or MRI data, or other complex data, is essential for patient care.  

References 

1. Aminolroaya, Z. (2023). Streamlining the Epilepsy Pre-surgical Evaluation Workflow with Virtual Reality. Ph.D. thesis, University of Calgary, April 2023.
2. Wang, N., Chan, S.-W., Aigner, D., Addam, O., Anthes, C., & Maurer, F. (2023). Serious Cross Reality – Using CR to Enhance Analytics Workflow. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Cross Reality at the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR, 2023), Sydney, Australia, October 16, 2023.