Virtual Surgery Will One Day Become a Reality

Imagine needing a very complicated and complex surgery - and letting your surgeon "practice" on a virtual recreation of you. You could die repeatedly while the surgeon improves their technique. Sound impossible? This type of process may be real in the very near future.

In a recent press release, a mathematician from the University of California - Los Angeles has detailed his findings and his plans to bring surgeons the ability to use virtual technology to practice a surgical technique prior to performing an actual operation.

Scientists are hard at work assembling the types of technology that would be needed to perform such an operation. Ideally, according to scientists, patients would be given a full body scan that logged everything about them.

This scan would allow a computer to recreate the patient virtually. All of a patients organs, blood vessels, and other body parts would be included in this 3-dimensional image, so the surgeon would be practicing on a life-like model of the real thing. Except without any of the risks of operating on the real patient.

This could be incredibly beneficial when surgeons are planning experimental or extremely high-risk operations. There have been several cases in the news of late where conjoined twins were separated. With virtual surgery, surgeons could practice over and over again until they determined the very best way to perform an operation.

"You can fail spectacularly with no consequences when you use a simulator and then learn from your mistakes. If you make errors, you can undo them - just as if you're typing in a Word document and you make a mistake, you undo it. Starting over is a big benefit of the simulation. Surgical simulation is coming, there is no question about it," he said. "It's a cheaper alternative to cadavers and a safer alternative to patients," said Joseph Teran. He joined UCLA's mathematics department in July 2007.

At the present time, scientists estimate that it could take a group of 20 people as long as nine months to make a virtual recreation of someone's entire bodily system. As computing and other technologies continue to expand, scientists anticipate that this time will be reduced down to as little as 10 minutes.

In addition to being used in the medical field, virtual technology will one day be used to help design cars, bridges, freeways, and aircraft to name just a few products. Since all materials, including human tissue, can be given some type of mathematical equation, the difficulty lies in developing the proper equations that would be used in development.

There are still many steps that have to be addressed before virtual surgery can become a reality, however, this technology is already being applied in many other medical areas.

Source:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-11/uoc--umw112607.php