A Survey on VR-Based Annotation of Medical Images

The usage of virtual reality (VR) in healthcare field has been gaining attention lately. The main use cases revolve around medical imaging and clinical skill training. Healthcare professionals have found great benefits in these cases when done in VR. While medical imaging on the desktop has lots of available software with various tools, VR versions are mostly stripped-down with only basic tools. One of the many tool groups significantly missing is annotation. In this paper, we survey the current situation of medical imaging software both on the desktop and in the VR environment. We will discuss general information on medical imaging and provide examples of both desktop and VR applications. We will also discuss the current status of annotation in VR, the problems that need to be overcome and possible solutions for them. The findings of this paper should help developers of future medical image annotation tools in choosing which problem they want to tackle and possible methods. The findings will be used to help in our future work of developing annotation tools.