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In football, transitioning from first-person to a bird’s-eye view and its relation to positional memory remains unclear. To investigate this, we developed and validated a system using immersive head-mounted displays (HMD) to assess football players’ abilities, thus potentially enhancing positional memory. We assessed experienced and inexperienced players in a virtual football setting with randomly placed players. We measured the time and perspective shifts required to reconstruct player positions from a bird’s-eye view. Further, both groups observed players in a virtual environment and then reconstructed their positions for accuracy. Compared to inexperienced players, experienced players showed higher precision in reconstructing the spatial arrangement of player objects, suggesting the feasibility of evaluating the transition from first-person to bird’s-eye view. The system enables us to assess ball control, memory of teammate and opponent positions, and recall of key player positions for future plays. This demonstrated the value of the immersive HMD system, which can quantitatively manipulate VR variables, in comprehensively understanding cognitive relationships. Expanding this system for evaluating player attributes and training football players holds great promise.

Study Design Retrospective cohort study. Purpose This study aimed to elucidate cases for which staged surgeries are effective by a retrospective review of previous operative cases of spinal ependymomas. Overview of Literature Patients with spinal ependymomas are expected to have a good prognosis following total resection. However, forcible dissection of spinal ependymomas will lead to neurological deterioration. Moreover, resection is sometimes difficult when the tumor is large. We have performed two-stage surgeries for large spinal ependymomas, but the indication of staged surgery is unclear. Methods We retrospectively reviewed patients diagnosed with spinal ependymomas who underwent tumor resection in our institution. We obtained data regarding patients’ clinical characteristics, tumoral radiological characteristics, and surgical factors and compared them to clear prognostic factors. Two-stage surgery was performed in 11 patients (36.7%), and single surgery was performed in 19 patients (63.3%). Results Thirty patients were included in the analyses and divided into two groups: single surgery and two-stage surgery groups. In the single surgery group, high tumor–cord ratio (TCR) and intraoperative motor evoked potential (MEP) reduction were significantly correlated with unfavorable outcomes, which were defined as deterioration of the modified McCormick scale grades 2 months and 1 year postoperatively. Alternatively, these factors were not significantly correlated with postoperative unfavorable outcomes in the two-stage surgery group. Receiver operating characteristic curves indicated that TCR of 0.866 yielded 85.7% sensitivity and 83.3% specificity 2 months postoperatively. Conclusions The results suggested that high TCR might be an indication of two-stage surgery and that its cutoff value is 0.866. Moreover, switching from single surgery to two-stage surgery may prevent postoperative neurological deterioration when intraoperative MEP is decreasing.