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. 2021 Oct 27;16(10):e0258103.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0258103. eCollection 2021.

3D virtual reality vs. 2D desktop registration user interface comparison

Affiliations

3D virtual reality vs. 2D desktop registration user interface comparison

Andreas Bueckle et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Working with organs and extracted tissue blocks is an essential task in many medical surgery and anatomy environments. In order to prepare specimens from human donors for further analysis, wet-bench workers must properly dissect human tissue and collect metadata for downstream analysis, including information about the spatial origin of tissue. The Registration User Interface (RUI) was developed to allow stakeholders in the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) to register tissue blocks-i.e., to record the size, position, and orientation of human tissue data with regard to reference organs. The RUI has been used by tissue mapping centers across the HuBMAP consortium to register a total of 45 kidney, spleen, and colon tissue blocks, with planned support for 17 organs in the near future. In this paper, we compare three setups for registering one 3D tissue block object to another 3D reference organ (target) object. The first setup is a 2D Desktop implementation featuring a traditional screen, mouse, and keyboard interface. The remaining setups are both virtual reality (VR) versions of the RUI: VR Tabletop, where users sit at a physical desk which is replicated in virtual space; VR Standup, where users stand upright while performing their tasks. All three setups were implemented using the Unity game engine. We then ran a user study for these three setups involving 42 human subjects completing 14 increasingly difficult and then 30 identical tasks in sequence and reporting position accuracy, rotation accuracy, completion time, and satisfaction. All study materials were made available in support of future study replication, alongside videos documenting our setups. We found that while VR Tabletop and VR Standup users are about three times as fast and about a third more accurate in terms of rotation than 2D Desktop users (for the sequence of 30 identical tasks), there are no significant differences between the three setups for position accuracy when normalized by the height of the virtual kidney across setups. When extrapolating from the 2D Desktop setup with a 113-mm-tall kidney, the absolute performance values for the 2D Desktop version (22.6 seconds per task, 5.88 degrees rotation, and 1.32 mm position accuracy after 8.3 tasks in the series of 30 identical tasks) confirm that the 2D Desktop interface is well-suited for allowing users in HuBMAP to register tissue blocks at a speed and accuracy that meets the needs of experts performing tissue dissection. In addition, the 2D Desktop setup is cheaper, easier to learn, and more practical for wet-bench environments than the VR setups.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Physical vs. virtual tissue registration.
(A) Bisected kidney on a dissecting board. Pink outlines indicate where the tissue block highlighted pink (shown in top right) will be extracted. (B) RUI with reference kidney of about the same size in x-y view. (C) RUI in z-y view with user interface that supports entry of tissue block size in mm, review of x, y, z position values, and change of tissue block rotation in 3D.
Fig 2
Fig 2. The task setup in our user study.
Reference organ with target block indicated (purple) and tissue block (white) to be registered into the target block. The light blue arrow indicates block centroid (mid-point) distance. Task difficulty increases as the tissue blocks get smaller, block rotation increases, and distance between the blocks increases. (A) 2D Desktop setup. (B) The two VR setups.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Setup, screen, and actions for 2D Desktop, VR Tabletop, and VR Standup.
(A-C) Three RUI setups with a human subject. (D-I) screenshots of the user interface. (J) Required actions. The tissue block is outlined in blue, the target block in green, and the kidney—providing context and domain relevance—in pink. Tasks are submitted by selecting the purple NEXT/red button. The user could reset the position or rotation of the tissue block by pressing the corresponding yellow-brown virtual (2D Desktop) and physical buttons (VR).
Fig 4
Fig 4. Task setup and levels of difficulty used in this study.
Distance, angular difference, size difference, number of tasks, and prompt type for the one Tutorial, 14 Ramp-Up, and 30 Plateau tasks. The offset (computed via Eq 1) is a value that is added to gradually increase the distance and angular difference between the two blocks, and that is used to gradually decrease the size of the two blocks. Note that due to the layout of this figure, only 13 out of the 14 Ramp-Up tasks are illustrated on the left.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Graphs for position and rotation accuracy.
(A-I) Scatter graphs showing the error for position accuracy (in mm), normalized by kidney height, during the Plateau phase. Each dot represents one of the 30 tissue block placements. The blue cross at the origin of each scatter graph shows the location of the target block. The blue dot shows the average of all centroids (bias). (J-L) Line graphs with rotation accuracy for each axis (x, y, z).
Fig 6
Fig 6. Completion time for both phases and all three setups.
(A-C) During the Ramp-Up phase. (D-F) During the Plateau phase. The vertical dash-dot line (black arrow) indicates after what task the plateau was reached, on average.
Fig 7
Fig 7. Position accuracy vs. completion time dependent on task number, i.e., tissue block size, with a log-log scale.
Fig 8
Fig 8. Position accuracy vs. completion time dependent on instructions.
The blue circles and blue crosses mark the average completion time and position accuracy for speed and accuracy prompts, respectively.
Fig 9
Fig 9. Grouped bar graph of overall user satisfaction.

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