Brain surgery may not be rocket science, but it is brain surgery. When manually removing brain tumors, extreme care is taken because a wrong move can lead to dire consequences. Canada’s National Research Council recently unveiled a prototype system that can assist neurosurgeons by providing a virtual practice space to try out a surgery before cutting into real flesh. The NeuroTouch system uses data of the patient’s own MRI to create a 3D representation of the anatomy around the tumor and a hand held probe which provides force feedback as one cuts away at the virtual tumor.
Here’s a CBC report about the NeuroTouch:
More about the system from MIT Technology Review…