A virtual reality system looks set to help teach surgeons to do their job.
Most surgical training involves reading textbooks, watching videos, practising on plastic models or cadavers, and assisting in real operations. But this often isn鈥檛 enough. According to one estimate, . The solution could be to get some virtual reality practice.
Orthopaedic surgeon Justin Barad has developed a virtual reality platform called for simulating orthopaedic operations such as knee surgery and shoulder reconstruction.
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Barad recently invited eight first-year medical students to try the system. Half followed an instruction manual to show them how to nail a rod聽into a shin bone, while the other four trained using the VR system for聽15聽minutes. Afterwards, the volunteers who had trained using the VR performed twice as well as the others when asked to repeat the procedure on a plastic model.
Six universities in the US have now signed up to use the technology in their orthopaedic surgery training programmes.
Osso VR consists of a headset and two hand controllers that allow students to cut open virtual patients and operate on them with virtual drills, screws and hammers. Activities like drilling through bone transmit sensations to your hands that change with the type of bone being drilled.
鈥淵ou look around and it鈥檚 like a real operating room. There鈥檚 a patient on the bed in front of you and you have to walk around to reach different tools,鈥� says , a third-year orthopaedic surgery student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
VR is likely to be more helpful than textbook-learning, says Matthew Donaldson, an orthopaedic junior fellow at University College London Hospital. 鈥淔amiliarity with equipment and ability to go through the steps of an operation in real-time are definite advantages,鈥� he says.
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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淒rill through bones in virtual reality鈥�
