The MediVerse: How VR is Changing Surgery
What Can We Learn From Early Applications of VR for Surgery?
In understanding the areas where VR is having an impact, we can anticipate ideal uses of the metaverse and virtual reality in any other industry. An industry at the forefront of advancing VR technology is medical surgery.
VR has the promise of massive efficiencies across various dimensions for healthcare and surgery: reduced cost and time for training, improved quality of care, reduced risk of bad outcomes, improved patient experience, and the enablement of procedures that would otherwise be deemed too risky to perform.
VR Training for Surgery
Giving new surgeons hands-on training experience using human subjects is by its nature very risky - no one wants to be the patient of a surgeon doing a procedure for the first time! But getting hands-on experience with surgery is vital for the trainee. This includes experience with both routine and highly repeatable procedures, as well as encounters with unexpected scenarios that come up mid-surgery.
Today, surgical training takes upwards of 7 years and includes classroom instruction, videos, and close supervision. Virtual reality offers a way to accelerate the training process. The student is immersed in 3D simulations and uses their own hands, along with surgical tools, to perform procedures on virtual patients. The student can repeat the training over and over, giving a level of comfort and proficiency with a procedure. At the same time, educators can assess the readiness of the student based on direct feedback on their performance.
Studies are showing that VR-trained surgical residents have far better performance than non-VR-trained residents. In one study of gallbladder removal, non-VR-trained surgical residents were 5 times more likely to injure the gallbladder than VR-trained residents.
VR for Complex and Risky Surgeries
Besides surgical trainings, another good application of virtual reality is for bespoke, or one-off, surgeries, such as risky brain surgery for tumor removal that must avoid nerves, brain tissue, etc. In such procedures, no two patients are exactly the same. So even for the experienced surgeon, there is a great amount of risk and potential for surprises.
Providing the surgical team with a VR model of the patient’s exact condition, using the patient’s own scans, provides the team with a way to develop plans, practice, and refine the surgical approach, all prior to making one incision.
It turns out that complex operations to separate conjoined twins are a good application for VR: Bernardo and Arthur Lima are twins born with their brains fused. They were unable to sit up or walk. Many surgeons thought that a surgery to separate them was impossible.
Surgeon Owase Jeelani took on their case. He has pioneered cutting-edge methods that utilize virtual reality for the planning and simulation of complex surgeries. Jeelani led the teams in the UK and Brazil that collaborated real-time using VR simulations. They incorporated models of the twins based on CT and MRI scans. Errors were made many times during the 6 months of practice sessions, all of which led to improvements in the surgical plans.
The three-year-old twins were successfully separated after surgeries taking more than 27 hours and involving more than 100 medical staff. VR headsets were used for the operation, allowing the teams to operate as if they were in the same room.
"In some ways these operations are considered the hardest of our time, and to do it in virtual reality was just really man-on-Mars stuff" said Jeelani. See an interview with Jeelani who describes the process: https://youtu.be/Os0oSVOvODs.
VR Helps Surgeons Reassure Patients
Benefits of VR can also be experienced by patients pre-surgery. Stanford Medicine is finding that by providing patients with the ability to visualize an upcoming procedure, the patients’ anxiety can be eased. In fact, some patients have chosen to have their surgery at Stamford Medicine because of the use of this technology.
Lessons from VR in Medical Surgery
Industries looking for ideal applications of VR and the metaverse can learn from early adopters like the medical surgery industry.
VR is an ideal application for providing hands-on surgical training in a low-cost and low-risk manner. Specialized trades, such as in the construction industry, could also benefit from such training programs.
VR is ideal for planning complex surgical procedures. Complex manufacturing processes may also similarly benefit from being designed using VR simulations.
And VR is a valuable tool for reassuring patients prior to surgery. There are many retail industries where buyers considering expensive one-off purchases may also be reassured through first experiencing a product virtually.
