Making Ionizing Radiation Visible: An X-Reality Application for Risk Assessment of Ionizing Radiation During Flatfoot Surgery

Extended Reality (XR) has experienced rapid growth in the past decades, proving to be a viable alternative to conventional practices in all the fields. Professional VR solutions have been developed; giving people access to virtual scenarios that are very similar to their real counterparts owing to the high level of realism reached with the latest technologies. Wearing a VR headset, the users can explore spaces they’ve never been before in real life, getting familiar with them without the dangers of the real-world circumstances. This principle paved the way to X-Reality development in the context of training for harmful procedures in many professional fields, and medicine makes no exception, being particularly involved in searching for novel methods to educate experts. This research explores the potential of X-Reality in medical training, proposing an innovative virtual training system to let medical personnel perceive ionizing radiation in a virtual scenario. The virtual environment was reconstructed with photogrammetry and within it users are able to fix their bad habits related to radiation exposure during an orthopedic surgery. To improve theXRsystem’s effectiveness a short beta testwas set up involving medical experts, with some interesting regarding the benefits and issues of the XR system.