- [Cara] For years we've been hearing insane amounts of hype about virtual
reality and how VR is going to change life as we know it, but the reality has been
a little less impressive.
That's about to change. Companies like Facebook and Microsoft are
pouring billions of dollars into developing ultra-realistic VR systems.
Video game makers and movie studios are releasing huge blockbusters designed
specifically for VR. Even porn companies are getting in on the action. But it's not
just sex and games; I'm going to meet two people who are using virtual reality as a
medical tool. If we really are entering the VR age, these guys want to use VR to
help people, not just entertain them.
We are at UCSD going to the CyPsy conference, like Cyber meets Psychology.
I'm excited to see maybe some uses
of VR that I have never really heard of before, and if this new
wave of psychological treatment headsets passes muster.
This is Fernando Tarnogol, a psychologist from Argentina. He's designed a software
program called Phobos that combines virtual reality and exposure therapy, and
this is his first time presenting it to the world.
- [Fernando] Phobos is virtual reality software that is intended to treat phobias
and anxiety disorders. We do that by exposing gradually the person through
different types of stimulus in order for the person to learn to manage their
anxiety.
- Fernando's theory is that patients who are exposed to their phobias in a
controlled virtual reality environment will get all the benefits of traditional
exposure therapy with less cost and risk. So if you're scared of spiders, you can
put yourself next to a virtual spider over and over again. A therapist can coach you
through it until, hopefully, you overcome your fear of the actual thing.
- All set? - [Man 1] I'm all set.
- Okay. Please stand there.
- So Fernando has arranged for a patient, a client, to actually come in and
demonstrate Phobos, but this isn't somebody who's just showing us how it
works; this is a real person who's never done it before, who is suffering from an
intense fear of heights.
- We're looking, on the screen is exactly what Andy is seeing.
- [Andy] I'm a pretty confident guy. I'm okay with public speaking, and snakes are
okay with me. Spiders, not a big deal. But heights is just...it engulfs me.
- Okay Andy, are you ready to start going up?
- Yeah.
- How common is VR in psychological assessment, diagnostics, treatment?
- Technology and psychology are very far apart, but the clinical trials
research has proven that this works.
We're at nine feet.
- Oy. There's a good anxiety kicking in right now.
- Of course this is not the only component of exposure therapy. There are
other processes and techniques that are also used, but you can use it as a bridge
between traditional therapies and this new way of doing therapy.
Is it okay if you move over to the ledge?
- How real does it have to look for your brain to be tricked that it's real?
- Actually, you can have an environment that is very simplistic in
geometry or texturing and still feel present. In a way, your brain is filling
in the gaps.
- Now there's wind. That's not cool.
- Your heart rate's going a little bit up, but it's okay.
- He was kind of shaking a bit, he was sweating. So I was really taken aback by
how real he thought it was and by how much it affected him physiologically.
- We're going to exit the experience, okay, and we'll talk about it.
- Okay.
- Okay, excellent. You were very brave. You made it to the top.
- I'd shake your hand but they're a little sweaty right now.
- VR isn't just good for curing everyday phobias. Some psychologists are
already using it to help soldiers recover from PTSD by exposing them to simulated
combat situations, and as the technology matures, we'll get more and more people
like Fernando using it for their patients' specific needs.
- This is new, it's evolving, and it's evolving very fast. We're just
starting. By the time we reach a point where we're out there with the software
where people are using it, that's when I'll feel that we are really making a
difference.
♪ [music] ♪
- But virtual reality isn't just promising for mental health patients. It's
also being used to improve physical medicine. I'm gonna meet with Dr. Neil
Martin, the chief neurosurgeon at the UCLA Medical Center, who's using virtual
reality headsets to improve the way he does brain surgery. Dr. Martin and his
team are working with a technology developed by a company called Surgical
Theater, which uses VR headsets to allow surgeons to step inside their patients'
brains before they operate on them. I'm interested to see how much utility VR has
in a very practical life or death situation.
So here you're demonstrating the VR technology, and this is an actual patient,
right?
- [Dr. Martin] Yes, this is one of our patients who had a brain tumor at the base
of the skull, so this one was almost halfway between my fingers, just behind
the right eye. We had two goals during a complex operation: take care of the
abnormality, remove a tumor; save all the normal structures: the nerves, the blood
vessels, the brain tissue itself.
I'm gonna put the headset on, and I'll be...
- The VR brain model is made by taking standard 2D MRI scans of the brain and
stacking them to form a three-dimensional model.
- Virtual reality gives you that understanding of your entire 180 or even
360 degree anatomy that is impossible to get with any other technique. In 10
minutes, 15 minutes, I can see the critical issues that I've got in mind that
have to be dealt with, and historically this took 10 or 20 years of experience to
turn two-dimensional, black and white x-rays into a three-dimensional mental
image.
And I can now fly into the skull. We're gonna fly past all the blood vessels here.
So I'm over on the opposite side of the head, and then if I turn around 180
degrees I'm looking at the backside of the tumor.
- Which is something you would never be able to do otherwise.
- So this is impossible during surgery, because you'd have to remove the
entire brain to get that perspective. I can walk around it and really get a
fantastic feel, a real feel, for exactly where the structures are.
- And now you actually did this surgery already, right?
- We would call this a complete reception, a complete removal of the tumor.
- That's amazing.
- At the turn of the century, the mortality rate for brain surgery was
about 19%, one person out of five.
- [Lucas] So are you creating this 3D model for every time you get a new scan?
- We'll be doing images in the future to make sure that we see no sign of
any tumor growing back.
Over the last 12 months we haven't had any mortality in hundreds of cases. Our
mortality rate isn't zero, but it's under 1% for patients who are not in a dire
crisis. We're really striving for perfection in every operation, so the goal
is, have them survive, lose no neurologic function, be back at work in a month, and
have no cosmetic evidence that they ever had surgery in the first place.
- That's incredible. - The structures that are...
- I think historically we've been led to believe that virtual reality is a fad.
It's come in waves, but I don't think the technology was there yet when everybody
got so excited about it. But I think VR is doing what we expected it to do all along,
and it's just getting more and more impressive.
- I can see a time when we're looking at the surface of the brain but
will virtually have 3D, x-ray vision and be able to see a tumor under the surface
and have great confidence during the operation.
- This isn't what's coming. This is here now and it's only gonna get better. I
mean, this isn't a fad. These neurosurgeons are using this technology
and it's making them better, and it's saving lives.