Easing patient fears of radiation treatment, via virtual reality

For a patient facing radiation therapy for cancer, the process is filled with unknowns. They might wonder about the radiation itself-will it burn? Then there's the face mask for head and neck cancerpatients-will it be tolerable? And those radiation placement tattoos-will they hurt? The uncertainty can be overwhelming for someone already dealing with fear, anxiety, or anger related to their diagnosis and other treatments.

Imagine if, before their first dose of radiation-in addition to talking with their care team and reading about what to expect during treatment-they could personally shadow another patient's treatment and get a private behind the scenes tour with the team members involved in every step of their care.

This type of experience is now possible in virtual reality, thanks to a pair of videos produced by a virtual reality film class at Penn, in partnership with Penn Medicine Radiation Oncology. They went live in the fall of 2024 with lung patients at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine; the department plans for other disease teams to slowly integrate them into their practices and eventually to share the videos with other Penn Medicine radiation therapy sites.

Besides creating an innovative educational tool to alleviate patients' fears, the project yielded benefits for both the film students and the radiation oncology staff, says Peter Decherney, professor of cinema and media studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, and the instructor of the undergraduate Virtual Reality Lab spring course.

The Radiation Oncology department, under the leadership of radiation oncologist William P. Levin, Fern Nibauer-Cohen, senior director of Patient Engagement for Radiation Oncology, and department chair James Metz, has embraced virtual reality as a tool to enhance patient care as well as patient education and clinical training. Levin is currently leading a study looking at patients' stress levels before and after watching a meditative, virtual reality-based guided breathing exercise. He has also incorporated VR into an anatomy course he teaches for medical physics master's degree students, using software to go "inside" an organ and "take it apart" to better understand it.

From a filmmaker's perspective, Decherney agreed that the immersive medium of virtual reality nicely fits the mission of assuaging patients' anxieties about the radiation process.

This story is by Daphne Sashin. Read more at Penn Medicine News.