Via The Huffington Post – Before carrying out a neurosurgery procedure, Dr. Neil Martin and his team at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center take a test drive through the patient’s brain.
Using a controller, the team zooms around blood vessels, navigating the brain’s complex architecture to examine all angles of a tumor or pinpoint an aneurysm.
What looks like a neurological video game is actually a high-tech simulation, allowing medical personnel to take a deep dive into a patient’s brain prior to surgery.
With the Surgical Theater SuRgical Planner platform, medical personnel can use standard medical imaging to create 3-D virtual renderings of brain structures.
“[The platform] gets you closer to a very real experience, a very real review of the anatomy,”
Martin, who serves as chair of neurosurgery at UCLA Medical Center, told Healthline.
Virtual reality has been making headlines for its potential to transform the ways we interact with our environments.