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“Virtual Operating Room” To Sharpen Surgeons’ Smarts and Skills
Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Awarded $2.7 Million NIH Grant To Develop Immersive,
Touch-Sensitive Virtual Reality Tools To Replicate the
High-Stress Environment of an Operating Room
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Suvranu De
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Even for highly trained physicians and surgeons, there’s no
teacher like experience.
This is the reason engineering researchers at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute are working to develop a virtual reality
operating room. Similar to how fledgling pilots train on flight
simulators before ever leaving the ground in an aircraft, the
virtual operating room will allow budding surgeons to
experience the stresses and nuances of the operating room
before they ever perform a procedure on a live patient.
Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
awarded a new $2.7 million grant to Rensselaer Professor Suvranu De to
create, test, and validate a virtual reality simulator that
seeks to replicate—as closely as possible—the environment of an
operating room. Most surgery simulators existing today are
solely focused on enhancing and assessing a surgeon’s hand
movements and motor skills. The new system will expand this
focus to enhancing and assessing a surgeon’s understanding of
the overall procedure as well as the cause-and-effect of their
actions.
The system will feature touch-sensitive surgical instruments
enabling users to touch, feel, and manipulate virtual tissues
and organs through surgical tool handles used in actual
surgery. The system will also include an immersive 3-D headset
with highly realistic graphics, and a “virtual mentor” who
offers tips, criticisms, visual and auditory cues, and other
feedback to help guide the surgeon’s actions and decisions.
For the study, De and his team will create a virtual
operating room to simulate an emerging minimally invasive
surgical technique known as single-incision laparoscopic
surgery for procedures such as gallbladder removal and gastric
banding. Rensselaer will partner with Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center and Tufts University in Boston on the project.
Once perfected, the simulator should be expandable to other
types of surgical procedures.
“While a variety of virtual reality-based skill trainers
currently exist, their major drawback is that they provide
primarily psycho-motor skill training, such as training for
hand-eye coordination and motor skills necessary for tasks such
as tool movement, cutting, and suturing,” said De, a member of
the Department of Mechanical,
Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer, with a
joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical
Engineering. “We believe that for a simulator to be truly
effective, in addition to psycho-motor skill training, it must
also provide cognitive skill training. This argument is
supported by adult-learning theories and research in flight
simulation technology.”
The project builds on De’s past work developing virtual
reality tools to train, test, and assess tomorrow’s surgeons.
He said these kinds of personalized surgical training
environments will expose surgical residents and surgeons to a
variety of rare adverse events, standardize the process of
skill training, and allow objective quantification of
performance that will start to result in improved patient
outcomes, reduced patient morbidity, and—ultimately—a healthier
nation and better health care system.
Over the past few years, the Accreditation Council for
Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) mandated simulation to be
part of resident education, and the American Board of Surgery
(ABS) required that simulation be provided as a criterion for
board certification in surgery.
This new focus on simulation directly acknowledges the fact
that the skill of a surgeon is the single most important factor
determining the success of minimally invasive surgical
procedures, De said. One study reports a complication rate of
14.7 per 1,000 patients for surgeons who have performed less
than 100 such procedures, in contrast to 3.8 complications per
1,000 procedures for more experienced surgeons. Another report,
by the Institute of Medicine, cites “error in the performance
of an operation” as a major contributor to the approximately
98,000 deaths per year attributable to medical errors—a number
that exceeds deaths from motor vehicle accidents, breast
cancer, or AIDS.
“Looking at the overall goal of improving health care and
making surgery safer and more effective for patients, virtual
reality simulators are a low-hanging fruit. There’s still much
work to be done, but this new and exciting technology holds the
promise of a better, safer tomorrow,” De said.
For more information on De’s research at Rensselaer,
visit:
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Published
December 13,
2011 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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