  Virtual Reality, an immersive technology that replicates an environment via
computer-simulated reality, gets a lot of attention in the entertainment
industry. However, VR has also great potential in other areas, like the medical
domain, Examples are intervention planning, training and simulation. This is
especially of use in medical operations, where an aesthetic outcome is
important, like for facial surgeries. Alas, importing medical data into Virtual
Reality devices is not necessarily trivial, in particular, when a direct
connection to a proprietary application is desired. Moreover, most researcher
do not build their medical applications from scratch, but rather leverage
platforms like MeVisLab, MITK, OsiriX or 3D Slicer. These platforms have in
common that they use libraries like ITK and VTK, and provide a convenient
graphical interface. However, ITK and VTK do not support Virtual Reality
directly. In this study, the usage of a Virtual Reality device for medical data
under the MeVisLab platform is presented. The OpenVR library is integrated into
the MeVisLab platform, allowing a direct and uncomplicated usage of the head
mounted display HTC Vive inside the MeVisLab platform. Medical data coming from
other MeVisLab modules can directly be connected per drag-and-drop to the
Virtual Reality module, rendering the data inside the HTC Vive for immersive
virtual reality inspection.
