Boston Children’s Hospital has teamed up with a Hollywood special effects firm to improve how surgeons learn to perform challenging surgeries. Fractured FX normally works in film, but has considerable experience with making models of patient organs, as can be seen on The Knick series on Cinemax.
Now they’re helping teams of clinicians practice putting neonates on cardiopulmonary bypass and how to do endoscopic third ventriculostomies (ETV) for treating hydrocephalus. Both procedures require considerable practice in order to avoid potential damage to the patients, but practice itself is dangerous and hard to come by.
The two new simulators represent the relevant anatomy with impressive quality, featuring the look and feel of real tissue, blood and cerebrospinal fluid, and response from the simulator that can be expected in practice. The devices allow teams to work with the simulators nearly identically to how they would with real patients, hopefully resulting in confident and steady hands that perform all the steps without causing unnecessary damage.
Here’s video about the program from Boston Children’s:
More info: SIMPeds.org…