Virtual Reality for Surgery Training

Does anyone remember the board game by Milton Bradley “Operation”? If you don’t then you’re probably not a child of the 1980’s and 1990’s; this game essentially tested the sensitivity of your hand when picking out plastic organs from an electronic board with the form of a cartoon man. If you happen to touch the sides where an organ was placed an electronic buzzer would go off signaling that you had failed in your attempt to remove whatever part of the body you were designated. Here’s a video to refresh your memory:

Even as a little boy I wondered to myself if this game actually meant something with regards to maintaining a calm hand when executing delicate maneuvers and if this could actually help real doctors.

The reason I bring this up is because today doctors and doctors in training are using virtual reality to simulate the real thing. Please watch this next video to see exactly how:

Reuters Video on Doctors Using Virtual Reality to Simulate Real Life Surgeries

This here is real ground breaking stuff people! You would be surprised at the amount of operations that students and apprentices perform on regular people under the watchful eye of a senior doctor. You’re not aware because you’re asleep during the operation, but this is actually quite common. As a patient this can be very unsettling because not only is your health at stake, but many times we are paying a premium for recognized doctors to perform particular surgeries on us.

Since this practice is quite common we can at least trust that students and apprentices that participate in our surgeries have been well trained. The real interesting thing about this particular technology is that a doctor doesn’t have to wear a helmet to simulate the operation; he has handles that accurately represent what is used in real surgeries, and these handles or controls are connected to a system that transmit a virtual  3D image to a TV of the inner parts of our bodies. The person with the handles can then virtually operate via the TV, like a video game. The handles actually provide resistance when managing the organs within the game that simulate their real life weight.

Not only does this make us feel that our doctors and surgeons are better prepared to perform surgeries but it also reduces the need for “guinea pigs”. The video mentions that doctors either learned on the fly with real patients or were provided with animals with which to practice surgeries on before they had this system.

Maybe the developers of this technology used “Operation” as influence, because virtual operations seem to be a more sophisticated version of the original board game. Nonetheless medicine has found a very efficient and effective way to train their surgeons. We can now feel safer when “we go under the knife”, and for animal rights activists this has to be considered a victory for them as many animals will be spared the label of “guinea pig”