Doctors in China have used virtual reality technology and 3D imaging to allow a surgeon to help in an operation taking place thousands of kilometres away, according to a newspaper report.

Doctors performed the surgery on a bone fracture at a hospital in Bortala in the Xinjiang region of northwest China on Monday, the Xinjiang Morning Post reported.

The chief doctor Ye Zhewei was, however, in a hospital in Wuhan in central Hubei province, about 3,700km (2,300 miles) away.

Ye was able to follow the procedure on a virtual reality technology headset and marked on a 3D image instructions for his colleagues to follow.

The 59-year-old woman patient, whose full name was not given, told the newspaper: “All the bones, muscle and nerves in my body became a 3D image. The position of the fracture became obvious and it also helped me to understand my condition.”

Ye was quoted as saying that the technology saved the expense of flying staff to help with operations far away and was more sophisticated than using simple webcams.

Virtual reality takes brain surgery into new dimension

In a world first, a patient in France undergoing brain surgery while conscious wore virtual reality glasses as doctors removed a cancerous tumour, the chief surgeon said on Tuesday.

“In creating a completely artificial world for the patient, we could map certain zones and connections of his brain related to functions that we could not, up to now, easily test on the operating table,” Philippe Menei, a neurosurgeon at Angers hospital in western France, said.

Taking a scalpel to the brain while a patient is conscious has been a common practice for more than a decade.

Doing so allows doctors to determine, during an operation, whether and how vital functions such as speech, vision and movement are affected.

Patients cannot feel the probing of their brain tissue, and do not experience pain.

But using three-dimensional, virtual reality opens up a whole new range of possibilities, Menei said.

“By totally controlling what the patient sees and hears, we can put him in situations that allow us to do tests on certain [neural] connections that were not possible before,” he said.

In this case, it was crucial to protect the patient’s vision because he had already lost sight in one eye due to an illness. During the operation, the medical team created a neutral virtual environment with no single point of focus.

“In this empty void, we could control the space and make luminous objects appear in the patient’s peripheral vision,” Menei said.

The operation was performed on January 27, and the patient is recovering well, he said. Their vision was intact despite the removal of an aggressive tumour in a region controlling sight.

Menei said the patient will now undergo chemotherapy.

Virtual reality glasses “open the way to greater precision, and allow us to envision procedures that were not possible up to now, such as the removal of otherwise inaccessible brain tumours”, he added.

His team plans to use the technique again in the coming months on patients with brain tumours situated near areas that control vision.

Virtual reality glasses could also be adapted for children, and may be tested on young patients before the end of the year.

Brain cancer is the second most common form of cancer among children in France.

Quelle:

http://m.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2127977/chinese-doctors-use-virtual-reality-tech-help-operation-3700km?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1913790/virtual-reality-takes-brain-surgery-new-dimension