cageymaru

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Caution, the videos in this article show realistic simulations of surgery in VR using 3D models, so it is possibly NSFW. Billed as the "flight simulator for surgeons," FundamentalVR is pioneering the use of VR to create immersive training tools for the medical community. CEO Richard Vincent outlined how the company is using low cost hardware, haptics, and global distribution through its reduced-cost platform model to breakdown the boundaries of adoption. This will allow the company to put surgical training into the hands of surgeons that have never had access to it.

The Fundamental Surgery platform "combines virtual reality (VR) with cutting-edge haptics (the sense of touch) to create a scalable 'flight simulator' experience for trainee and qualified surgeons, allowing them to experience and navigate the same visuals, sounds and feelings they would during a real surgical procedures." The platform is equipment agnostic, compatible with any laptop, VR headset or haptic device such as the HaptX gloves combined with a 3DS Haptic arm demonstrated in the video below. Last year, Fundamental VR signed a strategic collaboration and joint development agreement with Mayo Clinic to jointly develop surgical VR simulation and education products.

"When it comes to surgical training simulations, a sense of touch is a game changer, but has traditionally only been possible with immobile equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars," said Richard Vincent, CEO, FundamentalVR. "The Fundamental Surgery platform delivers highly sophisticated tactile feedback at a fraction of the cost through a software approach that can work with a range of haptic devices. Our platform currently works with haptic arms, but is designed to evolve as hardware innovations allow new products such as HaptX Gloves to come to market. We are proud to work with industry leaders such as HaptX and are excited to demonstrate how HaptX Gloves integrated into our Surgical Haptics Intelligence Engine TM takes the sensation of surgery to an exciting new and natural level."
 
i would love to get a realistic VR human body model for my vive. Play surgery
That would be fun!
https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-B2176-Classic-Operation-Game/dp/B01JF1VRL0

OperationLG.jpg
 
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"How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?"
"38... Simulated"
"How many combat drops?"
"Uh, two, including this one."

"Oh, man..."
 
I haven't seen VR based surgery first hand but I have seen several other clinician training simulators. Neat tech and they're leading toward the surgery angle right now. The main issue to make the jump is one of latency. It is fine when everything goes right and running in a lab, so the proof of concept is there already. The issue is the parts of when things don't go as well as planned with the patent and other technical issues (network drop). To tie this into the other big buzzword, there has been discussion of leveraging AI to work alongside doctor's in this environment to help handle those pitfalls. It certainly can happen but like many things in medicine, it'll make headlines now but you may not see it for a decade in actual usage.

The interesting thing about the VR training simulator I demo'd was that it was based off of the Unity game engine. Licensing at the time the project started was favorable and it was more straight forward to hook into the existing medical backend. The idea of Unity being able to interface with those databases to me was more impressive than the VR aspect. Even without the training or surgery simulator aspect, being able to go through vast arrays of data to display them in new meaningful ways is useful.
 
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