Just as athletes train for a game or actors rehearse for a performance, surgeons prepare ahead of an operation. Now, Atlas Meditech is letting brain surgeons experience a new level of realism in their pre-surgery preparation with AI and physically accurate simulations.
Neurosurgical Atlas offers case studies, surgical videos, and 3D models of the brain to more than a million online users. Dr Cohen-Gadol, also a professor of neurological surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, estimates that more than 90% of brain surgery training programs in the US – as well as tens of thousands of neurosurgeons in other countries – use the Atlas as a key resource during residency and early in their surgery careers.
“Every patient’s anatomy is a little different,” says Dr Cohen-Gadol. “What we can do now with physics and advanced graphics is create a patient-specific model of the brain and work with it to see and virtually operate on a tumour. The accuracy of the physical properties helps to recreate the experience we have in the real world during an operation.”
With a segmented view of a patient’s brain, Atlas Pathfinder can adjust its 3D brain model to morph to the patient’s specific anatomy, capturing how the tumour deforms the normal structure of their brain tissue. Using a VR headset, surgeons will be able to work within this virtual environment going step-by-step through the procedure and receiving feedback on how closely they are adhering to the target pathway to reach the tumour. AI algorithms can be used to predict how brain tissue would shift as a surgeon uses medical instruments during the operation and apply that estimated shift to the simulated brain.