World Medical VR Technology Company Unveils First-of-Its-Kind Neurosurgery Surgical Visualization Platform

A novel neurosurgery Virtual Reality (VR) visualization platform has been demonstrated at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2016 in California (USA).

The enterprise-wide solution is intended to help clinicians plan, prepare, and perform neurosurgery, and enable the surgeon to empower and engage their patients throughout the care cycle, from the examination room, to the operating room.

The platform was developed by Surgical Theater (Mayfield Village, Ohio, USA), a world leader in medical virtual reality systems. The platform includes NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA, USA) Graphics Processing Units (GPU) also used in VR gaming, flight simulation, and artificial intelligence. The Surgical Theater platform combines data from different imaging modalities including Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) to build a virtual reconstruction of a patients' anatomy.

The user of the new platform wears an HTC (Xindian; New Taipei City, Taiwan) Vive VR headset, and can perform a VR “fly through” of a patient’s anatomy, before and during the operation. This enables the neurosurgeon to navigate the unique anatomy of each patient and treat neurological disorders, and cerebrovascular diseases. The platform enables the neurosurgeon to show the patient the planned surgery in VR, and helps them understand the procedure.

Dr. Neil Martin, chairman of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; Los Angeles, CA, USA) Department of Neurosurgery, said, “Surgical Theater provides an immersive and memorable situational awareness when navigating through the inner space of the patient’s brain. Flying through the patient’s brain and having the ability to circumnavigate the tumor to see how the surrounding tissue, arteries or the optic nerve could be connected is critical to planning the removal procedure. It stays with you. So the terrain of the patient’s brain is familiar in surgery, which can enhance performance, reduce risk, and improve the overall outcome and timing of the surgery.”

Related Links:
University of California, UCLA
Surgical Theater
NVIDIA