The rapid progress in digitalization and automation have led to an accelerated growth in healthcare, generating novel models that are creating new channels for rendering treatment at reduced cost. The Metaverse is an emerging technology in the digital space which has huge potential in healthcare, enabling realistic experiences to the patients as well as the medical practitioners. The Metaverse is a confluence of multiple enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of medical devices, robotics, quantum computing, etc. through which new directions for providing quality healthcare treatment and services can be explored. The amalgamation of these technologies ensures immersive, intimate and personalized patient care. It also provides adaptive intelligent solutions that eliminates the barriers between healthcare providers and receivers. This article provides a comprehensive review of the Metaverse for healthcare, emphasizing on the state of the art, the enabling technologies to adopt the Metaverse for healthcare, the potential applications, and the related projects. The issues in the adaptation of the Metaverse for healthcare applications are also identified and the plausible solutions are highlighted as part of future research directions.

This paper proposes a cost-efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) for robust automatic modulation classification (AMC) deployed for cognitive radio services of modern communication systems. The network architecture is designed with several specific convolutional blocks to concurrently learn the spatiotemporal signal correlations via different asymmetric convolution kernels. Additionally, these blocks are associated with skip connections to preserve more initially residual information at multi-scale feature maps and prevent the vanishing gradient problem. In the experiments, MCNet reaches the overall 24-modulation classification rate of 93.59% at 20 dB SNR on the well-known DeepSig dataset.