![]() ![]() "With our system, you could practice her specific surgery, navigating all of the specific details of her actual knee, as many times as you need to," says Huber. The knee I mangled is a virtual reproduction of hers, created from CT scans prior to her surgery. "Sue Gerry," my poor, likely forever-limping virtual patient, is a pseudonym for a real person. They could practice on future patients without even touching a scalpel. With Varises, he says, doctors could learn and practice iTotal on their own. He travels the globe teaching other surgeons how to do it. Huber was among the earliest adopters of the iTotal technology, which uses 3D printing to create a customized joint-replacement system. Though it will eventually imitate a variety of orthopedic surgeries, the Varises simulator currently replicates the procedure for the iTotal PS knee-replacement system developed by Billerica, Mass., medical tech company Conformis. An instruction manual is no replacement for hands-on experience. "But how do you learn them?" he asks rhetorically. He points to the thousands of orthopedic companies around the country developing new technologies and techniques all the time. Huber notes that a surgeon doesn't stop learning once he or she graduates from med school. "You'd become more accurate, and you'd deliver better results." ![]() "You'd be practicing the art of surgery," he continues. "If you could observe a surgery and then go to the lab and do them, but then practice using this service, as much as you want, imagine how much quicker the adoption would be. ![]() "Imagine if we could get a surgeon up to speed more quickly than that old process that I was in," says Huber, a surgeon at Mansfield Orthopedics at Copley Hospital in Morrisville. As the full name suggests, its creators envision the simulator as a tool to expedite the learning process among medical students and practicing surgeons. Varises stands for Virtual and Augmented Reality Immersive Surgical Education Systems. Varises is a force multiplier in that regard." "There just isn't enough time in the day, or there aren't enough cadavers or laboratory access. "That has to do with time and availability," Steele explains. What hasn't changed, he says, is how long it takes to complete formal medical training within a surgical specialty. "Think about how long patients used to have to stay in the hospital and now how quickly we can turn them around. "If you think a couple of decades out from now, hospitals in their current form aren't going to exist in the same manner," says Kip Steele, an IT program manager for the University of Vermont Health Network. It's a painstaking process that Huber believes is increasingly out of step with the modern medical world. Since the late 1800s, surgeons have learned their trade by practicing on cadavers and observing and assisting in operations. ![]() "We think it's well past time to change that." "We've been teaching surgery the same way practically since the dawn of modern surgery," says Huber, 53. When Varises unveils its simulator at a Las Vegas trade show in December, it could revolutionize the way doctors are trained. If Huber and Berlin have their way, real surgeons, as well as those in training, will soon be playing doctor on TV, too - or perhaps more accurately, given the VR program's immersive quality, playing doctor in TV. To borrow one of Berlin's favorite Varises-related jokes: I'm not a doctor, but I've played one on TV. Bryan Huber and accelerated into production by entrepreneur Steven Berlin, both of Stowe, the program is billed as a "flight simulator for surgeons." Specifically, I was training in the virtual reality surgery simulator being developed by the new Vermont startup Varises. Whoops.įortunately for Gerry and her troublesome right knee, my recent foray into orthopedic surgery was a facsimile. Also, I dropped some rather important, and sterile, knee hardware on the floor of the operating room, like, three times. That's a small step in a larger knee-replacement procedure and a relatively basic step at that - at least when sawbones other than myself are performing it. For starters, I accidentally shaved a few extra millimeters off Sue Gerry's femur during a recent distal femoral resection. ![]()
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