Fighter pilots invented a revolutionary way for surgeons to peer inside people’s skulls
Fighter pilots and brain surgeons have a lot in common.
With limited time and a high degree of risk, they must zero in on a dangerous target with the intent to destroy, making sure to minimize any collateral damage.
Perhaps no one understands that relationship better than Alon Geri and Moty Avisar, veterans of the Israeli Air Force and co-founders of Surgical Theater, an Ohio-based company that brings state-of-the-art virtual reality to brain surgeons.
Physicians in thick black goggles can step inside a patient's skull, explore the malformed region, craft a strategy for entry, elimination, and exit, and even do dry runs of the surgery itself.
The technology, which Surgical Theater calls SNAP (Surgical Navigation Advanced Platform) uses existing MRI scans to create 3D models, which are compatible with virtual reality. Geri and Avisar, both engineers, developed SNAP after working extensively on flight simulation. They realized in the early 2000s that the problems facing brain surgeons were nearly identical to those of their fellow pilots.
"You do it wrong the first time, and it's either game over or you spend the rest of the surgery putting out fires," Geri tells Tech Insider.
SNAP is being used in nine locations so far, including Stanford, UCLA, and New York's Mount Sinai Hospital. A tenth location will adopt the technology later this year, Geri says. Doctors have performed about 900 surgeries using SNAP to date.
See the full story here: http://www.techinsider.io/virtual-reality-brain-surgery-2016-7