http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou090622_tnt_3-d-surgery-images.1636f69a.html
Video game surgery: Houston hospital builds surgical simulator
10:01 AM CDT on Tuesday, June 23, 2009
By Dave Fehling / 11 News
HOUSTON—Surgeons at Houston’s Methodist Hospital are using technology from video games to prepare for delicate operations. In a low-light room they liken to a cave, doctors use an Xbox controller to manipulate video images of patients’ livers, colons, even brains, looking for the best ways to do life-and-death procedures.
11 News Video
Video game surgery: Houston hospital builds surgical simulator
June 22, 2009
View larger
E-mail Clip
More Video
“This is a patient who has colon cancer that has spread to his liver,” explained Dr. Thomas Aloia as he showed 11 News a full color, 3-dimensional computer video of a patient’s internal organs.
The challenge for Dr. Aloia is to determine exactly what part of the liver to remove so that at least 25 percent of the organ is left intact. If not, Dr. Aloia said, “He is likely to go into liver failure and have complications.”
Previously, Dr. Aloia would have used 2-dimensional images from a CAT scan.
“We like to think this is very accurate, but we do know this is a calculation,” Aloia said as he looked at one of the old, black-and-white images.
Now, with the 3-D video, he can do a “virtual” operation, removing the diseased section of liver and measuring what is left to make sure it meets the 25-percent goal. It does, so he knows he can proceed with the surgery, confident of what he’ll find when he actually makes the incision.
“They come in and get a different perspective of what their patient looks like before they go to the operating room,” said Dr. Brian Butler, a radiation oncologist who led the team at Methodist Hospital that is developing the 3-D surgical simulator.
It works by first taking the data from CAT scans. But it takes them a big step further. The researchers at Methodist actually hired video game programmers to use that data to build 3-D images, the very same sort of technology that gives computer games their realism. But in this case, what doctors see is isn’t computer “animation.”
“It’s the real patient. That’s you. And that’s the blood vessels in your body,” said Dr. Butler.
In one video, doctors can “fly” inside the length of a patient’s colon, clearly seeing polyps and other abnormalities. No invasive colonoscopy is needed.
“I can say this is your heart, this is your liver, and you’ll say, oh yeah, that’s obvious,” Butler said.
On Wednesday, Dr. Aloia will go into the operating room for the first time having already done the operation on the computer. He will already have “virtually” removed the diseased section of his patient’s liver and seen an exact reading to that shows he didn’t take too much.
“So this is the difference between working in 2-D and guessing and working in 3-D and knowing,” Dr. Aloia said.
“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how this is going to affect surgical therapies,” Dr. Butler added.
The team here at Methodist envisions “surgical simulators,” like what pilots use to practice landings, that allow them to go inside your body, before you ever get to the operating room.
