Medical Education and Virtual Reality

Abstract

 Usually, people train for their skills by using driving simulators for driver’s licenses and flight simulators for the flight by airplanes. With the same idea, it should be necessary to use surgical simulators in order to train for surgical skills, and these days several simulators are being developed in many institutes. Surgical simulators enable surgeons to obtain the opportunity for surgery trainings without patient’s burdens and animal bodies. With the simulators, doctors can train for not only general pathologies but also rare cases, and also it is possible to inspect the pre-operation planning based on the data from real patients. Surgical simulators use virtual reality technology, which enables us to get a stereo view of the computer screen and to touch the object displayed on the screen. In this paper, a surgical simulator developed by the authors for ophthalmologists and its components are described.