Virtual reality helps Chinese medicine students learn acupuncture and doctors treat cancer
Chinese and Western medicine is being improved by VR applications, with acupuncture students using 3D body maps and surgeons tackling tumours conventional medicine cannot reach
Wearing goggles and holding a gaming controller, students at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine are immersed in a three-dimensional human body marked with acupoints and meridian pathways.
The 12 major pathways, channels through which the life energy known as “qi” flows in Chinese medicine, are illustrated in moving dots, with the body’s organs, nerves, muscles and other human tissues around them shown in various colours.
The innovative programme, which began in May, is teaching students at China’s top Chinese medicine university acupuncture using virtual reality (VR). Their professor, Cheng Kai, said the system, BodyMap – developed by Augmented Intelligence in the American state of Virginia – can be used both on campus and remotely.
“There’s a very high level of requirement for precision in acupuncture teaching. For example, there’s an acupoint called jinming, which is situated very near the optic nerve,” Cheng says. “Needling this acupoint carries a certain danger [if the practitioner does not grasp the precise depth and angle for the insertion of the needle]. The VR learning system is a big improvement on traditional acupuncture teaching based on two-dimensional images and the use of real people as models.
“The system is stored in cloud servers. Using the goggles, students can do self-learning and pre-lesson revision. We are applying to the central government to set up a lab based on the system. Our university is the leader among all the Chinese medicine universities across the country.”
