Bloodless Clues For Cutting-edge Surgeons In Specs

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday September 16, 1999

By SUE LOWE

Surgeons will soon be perfecting their skills on virtual reality patients. Wearing goggles, they will be able to conduct simulated procedures and get the same visual and tactile feedback as from a living body.

Dr David Storey, who chairs the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons's NSW committee, said: "The surgeon would be scored by the computer on technical aspects of the operation, such as the number of unnecessary movements, the angle of needle insertion into an artery, whether the correct level of tension was applied and the spacing of stitches.

"The rationale is to reach a situation where the first time a new procedure is carried out on a human body it will have been carried out many times on a computer simulator."

The College is planning a $10 million to $11 million advanced training centre for surgeons, to be equipped with state-of-the-art virtual reality and robotic surgery.

A first demonstration of what cyber surgery could offer will be opened tomorrow at the Technology Park in Redfern.

About 150 surgeons, obstetricians, gynaecologists, theatre nurses and paramedics are expected at the preview.

Dr Storey predicts such high-tech teaching systems would increase the cost of training by $8,000 to $10,000 per surgeon but ultimately lower the total cost of health care.

Dr Storey also predicted an initial increase, rather than decline, in the number of human cadavers needed after the training centre was established.

"There is some concern that the level of anatomy training is less than it once was," he said.

The centre, which may be up and running by mid-2000, would be part of a broader effort to "bring anatomical knowledge up to level".

Because of the high cost and massive computer processing power required by some visualisation systems, some early demonstrations will be only on video.

One video reconstruction to be shown tomorrow is based on the World Wide Web Visual Human Project, in which the bodies of a male and female were dissected into millimetre-thin sections and digitally photographed.

The result was a complete "atlas" of human anatomy. The images have been publicly available on the Web and on CD-ROM for more than five years.

"The only problem is that the computer needed to run it is the size of a small bus," he said.