Virtual reality becomes a key tool in bone cancer operations

The Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires and the Technological Institute of the same city are using virtual reality to perform bone cancer surgeries. A simulator allows the operation to be rehearsed before and to guide the surgeon during the intervention safely and accurately.

Using a virtual reality scenario, developed in Argentina, the medical teams of the Italian Hospital and the Technological Institute located in Buenos Aires perform an interactive and three-dimensional simulation of the condition to replace conventional presurgical planning.

The system is capable of combining images made by computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging to obtain a precise detail of the tumor that needs to be operated on.. Like this, The surgeon rehearses in a virtual environment how the intervention will be, Defining the characteristics of the tumor, planning the steps to follow and, if necessary, Select from a donor bone bank what needs to be rebuilt.

Another advantage of this virtual simulation system is that it allows to take better advantage of the tissues that are saved for transplants. To organize this database, they digitized the information of more than 50 donor pieces and developed a virtual version of this repository. In this way, When the pieces to be transplanted can be searched by dimensions and morphology of the bone to be replaced. And to facilitate the search they developed an algorithm that is responsible for carrying out this process in the virtual bank..

Like a GPS

When it's time for intervention, The surgeon has a surgical navigator, containing the cartography of the area to be treated, to carry out the process you have previously tried. This gives the surgery greater precision and safety, avoiding many risks.

This system completely changes the paradigm of surgery. While interventions are usually planned with two-dimensional images, This solution allows planning and executing surgery in three dimensions. At least in rigid fabrics, such as bones or cerebral cortex (in this case, only if it is a tumor that will not change position or shape).

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