For years, pilots have been using flight simulators to train and rehearse for their jobs, and now, with the help of technology developed by NRC, surgeons can too! By practicing upcoming surgeries using a VR simulator, doctors are able to go into live surgeries already knowing what to expect and therefore ensuring the safety of their patients.

And this is exactly what happened on August 20^th2009, when neurosurgeon Dr. David Clarke successfully removed a brain tumour from a live patient, whose surgery he had already "practiced" on a virtual-reality neurosurgical simulator developed by NRC.

In this "world first", Dr. Clarke used the NRC technology to perform a patient-specific rehearsal of a brain tumour surgery in a virtual-reality environment.

Dr. David Clarke, neurosurgeon at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, used the virtual-reality neurosurgical simulator, developed at the NRC, to successfully remove a brain tumour.

The system allows surgeons to tailor complex neurosurgical rehearsals to individual patients. To create a realistic simulation environment, researchers take a series of sophisticated MRI scans of the patient's brain, including its anatomy and critical regions. These images are then incorporated into the simulator to reflect back a highly accurate three dimensional representation of the patient's brain, allowing surgeons to see and experience what it would feel like to interact with that tissue.

For example, when surgeons using the virtual simulator touch virtual fibrous tissue, they feel resistance, and when they touch soft tissues, their instruments move smoothly. And when they remove a virtual tumour, they have to tug a little with their instruments to dislodge it, just as they would during a real surgery.

The simulator's unprecedented high-resolution haptics hardware allows surgeons to move and touch the virtual tissue of the brain; integrated software makes it behave as it would in actual surgery, creating a realistic learning and training environment for surgeons, a truly remarkable achievement in technology!