Surgeons performed brain surgery on twins using VR in the Metaverse. (Source: Adobe Stock)

Metaverse Healthcare Uses Range from VR Surgery to Connecting Staff, Deepfakes Threaten Other Areas

According to a story on verdict.co.uk, the Metaverse is taking off–at least when it comes to healthcare uses like training surgeons and treating social anxiety. As many as eight in 10 healthcare professionals surveyed by Accenture said they expect the Metaverse to have a positive impact on the industry.

“As the metaverse expands at an exponential rate, new opportunities in healthcare emerge,” Evgen Verzun, founder of Kaizen Finance,” told verdict.co.uk.

Among the uses he cited were “expanded use of VR in medical education, the implementation of AR in surgery, gamification to connect hospital staff and patients, interoperability, and more.” The

In early August, one of the most dramatic uses of the Metaverse and VR was highlighted when the BBC reported that a team of international surgeons had been training in VR for months separating two three-year-old twins with conjoined heads. The two Brazilian twins, Bernardo and Arthur Lima, underwent seven surgeries because they were born sharing vital veins in their brains. The surgeries were a success.

Surgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani described the VR training as “space-age stuff” because it involved surgeons in separate countries wearing headsets and operating in the same “virtual reality room” together.

Meanwhile, in a story on forbes.com, at least one company warned that the existence of deepfakes could jeopardize the integrity of the Metaverse. Bruce MacCormack, co-lead of Project Origin, which is building software to enable audience members to verify information that claims to come from a trusted news source, has said that deepfake software is improving at a faster rate than the time it takes to implement detection software, a problem with serious implications for the future metaverse.

“If you put the detection tools in the wild, just by the nature of how artificial intelligence works, they are going to make the fakes better,” MacCormack explained. The acceleration of malicious material generation will reach a “point where the lifecycle of a tool or the lifespan of a tool would be less than the time it would take to deploy the tool,” he added.

read more at verdict.co.uk