Virtual Reality Makes for Better-Trained Surgeons
Chris Wiltz | December 13, 2017
Osso VR has a question for you: How skilled is your surgeon, really?
Some medical technologies can require hundreds of uses before a surgeon becomes proficient with them. Typical surgeon training involves working with cadavers, but doing this only allows trainees one, maybe two, sessions’ worth of experience. The rest of their training consists of watching videos and animations. Five to six months later they can get their first patient, which could be you or one of your loved ones.
How then can medical training be improved in a way that’s both cost effective and yields reliable and verifiable results? According to Calfornia-based startup Osso VR, virtual reality holds the key to better training and outcomes for surgeons.
“VR provides an on-demand way to train surgeons and democratize techniques many surgeons may not have access to,”Leif Goranson, Director of Marketing at Osso VR told an audience at the recent Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in Silicon Valley. “Today there are too many technique and complex procedures to keep up with emerging technologies.”
Osso VR was founded in 2016, the founders Justin Barad and Matt Newcomb both come from backgrounds as video game developers. Barad later transitioned to medicine – studying at UCLA and eventually becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Goranson said that during this time Barad saw the gaps in orthopedic training and came to understand that one-to-one training in clinics and with medical devices companies simply isn’t very effective.
For starters there aren’t any measurable metrics tied to medical training. “Cadaver training has no objective measurement tied to it,” Goranson said. “There’s no way to tell if a surgeon is good or not good at the surgery yet. The reason for that is even if you survey surgeons after a course or lab sessions they don’t give objective measurements of themselves.”
