VR Gets Real In The OR

Doctors and medical students are increasingly using virtual reality to prepare for surgery.

- Andrew Zaleski

A FEW DAYS BEFORE tugging on surgical gloves to slice open a patient’s brain, doctors at Stanford University slip on virtual reality goggles to help prepare for the risky procedure. Conventional MRI or CT scans can reveal only so much about what a patient’s brain looks like. But feed those images into VR technology, and surgeons can see the brain—all the ridges and fissures, lobes and veins—in 3D, so they can simulate surgery before stepping into the operating room.

“It’s as if we have been there before, and it’s not a surprise,” says Gary Steinberg, a Stanford Medicine neurosurgeon who helped create the school’s two-year-old Neurosurgical Simulation and Virtual Reality Center.

Stanford Medicine is just one of a growing number of hospitals and medical schools embracing virtual technology. The goal is to provide better and faster training for resident doctors and surgeons, whose skill can mean the difference between life and death for their patients.

Virtual reality’s adoption in medicine comes after major improvements to the technology over the past few years. Early headsets and software provided jerky imagery that nauseated some users, ruling it out for medical training.