Inspiration springs from experience
One key to the design and building of these simulators is Robert Sweet, M.D., a urologic surgeon and Medical School alumnus who's returning to Minnesota this fall as a new faculty member and the newest leader on the Academic Health Center's virtual reality and simulation sciences team.
Working under stressful circumstances before mastering a skill has long been required of medical students and residents alike. Sweet has his own story. As a second-year resident, he was in the operating room attempting a surgical resection under the super-vision of an attending surgeon when a sea of blood suddenly obscured his view.
When students interact with one of these patient simulators, the level of engagement is very gratifying, both for the student and for the instructor.
— Joe Clinton, M.D., professor and head of the Medical School's Department of Emergency Medicine
"I had to rely on what I had read in textbooks, but my attempts to reorient myself were of no avail, and the case was rapidly taken over by the attending surgeon," he explains. "A one-hour hands-on training opportunity was suddenly reduced to 75 seconds."
Feeling frustrated and defeated, Sweet watched the remainder of the procedure on the video monitor in the operating room and wondered how he was ever going to master the procedure himself. "I wondered how my predecessors, without the use of double-headed scopes or video, had acquired their skills. And of course it was practice — on live patients in the operating room."
As he continued to watch the monitor, it occurred to Sweet — a member of the video game generation — that a transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) was like a video game, and therefore there must be some way to train resection skills outside the operating room. Thus began his entry into the world of simulation and virtual reality.
During his residency at the University of Washington in Seattle, Sweet found collaborators at the university's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, where they'd already built and validated a virtual reality TURP simulator from the ground up. When presenting his work at an international conference for virtual reality researchers, he met and was captivated by Richard Satava, M.D., who was then at Yale University. "Dr. Satava is considered by many to be the grandfather of medical virtual reality simulation," says Sweet. "I consider myself lucky to have worked with him."
Soon afterward, Satava came to the University of Washington, where Sweet studied under him for two years while they spearheaded the launch of the Institute for Surgical and Interventional Simulation. As Sweet settles into his new role, he says, "I'm eager to take what I've learned from him and apply it to the enormous resources available at the University of Minnesota."