Virtual Reality for Immersive Education in Orthopedic Surgery Digital Twins

Virtual Reality (VR) technology, when integrated with Surgical Digital Twins (SDTs), offers significant potential in medical training and surgical planning. We present SurgTwinVR, a VR application that immerses users within an SDT and enables them to navigate a high-fidelity virtual replica of the surgical environment. While several VR and AR systems exist for medical education, ours is the first to propose a virtual dynamic 3D environment that is a clone of a real surgery, encompassing the entire surgical scene, including the surgeon, anatomical structures, surgical instruments, and the operating room. Our system is based on the SDT [2] with some important improvements to make it suitable for real-time rendering, which is essential for an immersive experience. It has been enhanced to reduce the time required for displaying the surgeon in action, and additional features have been added to showcase the potential benefits of such an application in surgical education.