Opening a new era of AR medical treatment in the metaverse (Niels H. Chavannes, Bai Chunxue)

Welcome to the new era of AR medical treatment in the metaverse.

The purpose of the two consecutive articles on “AR Medical Treatment in the Metaverse” published in this journal is to apply metaverse technology to explore new avenues to improve the level of healthcare and medical services. The first article, “AR Medical Treatment in the Metaverse” [1], clearly outlines that AR medical treatment in the metaverse is an IoT medical treatment carried out through AR technology, and discusses its background and significance. The second article, “Consensus of Experts on AR Medical Treatment in the Metaverse” [2], invited doctors and related IT experts from Asia, the United States, and Europe to form a multidisciplinary expert group. By adopting and analyzing previously published consensus statements on IoT medical treatment and referencing related research on metaverse technology, the expert group further clarified the definition of AR medical treatment in the metaverse and achieved a consensus on it.

Based on the evidence presented in articles [1,2], the editor agrees that the background of the emergence of the metaverse in medicine is to meet the needs of public health and provide more standardized services. In China and many developing countries, due to differences in resources and medical experience between large and small hospitals, small hospitals have low coverage of high-end equipment, low mastery of technology, and low patient recognition. This has led to a large number of patients seeking medical treatment in large hospitals, which in turn has created difficulties in seeing famous doctors and getting admitted to prestigious hospitals. Additionally, because specialists in large hospitals face too many patients, this has resulted in issues such as poor prevention, healthcare, management, and rehabilitation during diagnosis and treatment. Furthermore, there are differences in clinical experience among doctors in large hospitals. For example, there is a large difference in the assessment of the malignancy of lung nodules between 5-10mm by manual reading. Experienced doctors can achieve a sensitivity and specificity of more than 95%, while those with less experience may be below 50%. To address these challenges, Bai et al. proposed and developed the Internet of Things in Medicine [3-5] to improve the standardized diagnosis and treatment levels through linkage, efficiency, and precision. However, in clinical practice, there are still some problems that cannot be solved, especially the difficulty of having experienced doctors guide less experienced doctors in real-time and space, making it difficult to control the quality of clinical medicine and improve the level of diagnosis and treatment among doctors. The reason for this is not only related to the limitations of Internet technology itself but also to the difficulty for experienced doctors to meet the demand of several hundred times their own. To solve these problems, a more advanced technological platform is needed, especially one based on metaverse integration of the virtual and real worlds, human-machine integration, and virtual-real linkage technology [6,7]. Through virtual-real interaction, human-machine integration, and guidance from experienced doctors, these problems can be addressed, and this will also promote the rapid development of metaverse medicine and health.

Currently, the concept of the Metaverse has received widespread attention and is broadly believed to be a new type of virtual-real integrated internet platform that integrates various new technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) [1,2]. According to this consensus, the concept of “Metaverse Medicine” proposed by Bai et al. is reasonable, as it refers to IoT (Internet of Things) medicine practiced through AR technology. The purpose of establishing this consensus is to improve the level of health and disease prevention and treatment through the development of Metaverse Medicine, elevate the current artisanal diagnosis and treatment model to an AI intelligent professional diagnosis and treatment model, and achieve a modernized diagnosis and treatment flow operation that meets national and even international standards. At the same time, consensus experts unanimously believe that the conditions for establishing “Metaverse Medicine” have matured, and have reached a consensus on how to develop Metaverse Medicine to better serve medicine and public health. According to this consensus [2], we can realize the IoT medical process of comprehensive perception, reliable transmission, and intelligent processing through Metaverse’s holographic construction, holographic simulation, virtual-real fusion, and virtual-real linkage technologies [3-5]. This includes interactive teaching, popular science, remote medical treatment, hierarchical diagnosis and treatment, and clinical research between virtual and real cloud experts and end doctors, as well as prevention, health care, physical examination, disease diagnosis and treatment, rehabilitation, chronic disease management, home care, emergency assistance, outpatient and consultation services provided through interactive communication between virtual and real cloud experts and end-users.

In order to better leverage the role of journals in promoting academic development, this journal will adopt metaverse technology in a timely manner to serve health and medicine, and promote the development of big health. We welcome the arrival of this new era! As an “electronic magazine,” this journal is edited, published, and distributed with the support of computer, electronic communication, and network technology. Therefore, it is necessary for this journal to apply metaverse technology to health and medicine in a timely and dynamic manner, and present it to readers, in order to produce better results than general magazines. To this end, this journal actively supports research on metaverse medicine, especially the application of holographic construction, holographic fusion, virtual-real fusion, and virtual-real linkage IoT medical technology in the study of human health levels, integrating the virtual world into the real world for interaction, in order to significantly improve teaching, training, remote consultation, graded diagnosis and treatment, health care, aging, science popularization, patient education efficiency [1,2]. At the same time, authors are welcome to submit their research results for rapid publication in this journal, enabling readers to timely and realistically perceive the convenience brought by the promotion and application of metaverse medicine.