Ohio State University's Award-Winning Virtual Bone Drilling Machine

Game-inspired simulators have been helping medical students become more proficient surgeons, but as developers refine the teaching tools, they're also becoming recruitment tools.

The Virtual Temporal Bone Project, developed at Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, is a highly polished 3D surgical simulator that uses haptic feedback to give students the 'feel' of actually drilling into the temporal bone, which sits on the side of the skull and is involved in hearing and balance.

Don Stredney, one of the project's leads, told Columbus Business First that the simulator is much more efficient than traditional tools. "A student may only have 15 or 20 minutes of free time to practice. It's not nearly enough time to prepare a lab experiment, but a student can simulate all or part of a procedure." Currently, training a surgeon in the procedure to alleviate otologic disease requires five to seven years and costs more than $76,000. Otologic disease accounts for more than $8 billion in health-care costs annually.

Laura Matrka, a third year resident at OSU's Department of Otolayrngology, pointed to the value of using game technology to teach complex tasks like temporal bone surgery. "We're all comfortable with playing videogames, and this is a much easier sell for residents just getting comfortable with the temporal bone."

The virtual bone-drilling 'game' also has the advantage of allowing 'do-overs,' something not possible with precious cadaver material.

The hardware costs about $6500 and the software is open source. The simulator's realism has already won awards in the medical community. But developers are still not satisfied. Stredney says he and his team are already working on simulating the effect of bone dust created by the drilling.

Beyond medical residents and veterinary applications, the project's developers are keen on using a less graphically realistic version of the game to recruit interest in anatomy among high-school students and younger kids, all the way down to kindergartners.

Says Stredney, "What is education if it's not a seed?"

A Quicktime movie demonstrating the simulator is available here.