Virtual Reality Tutorials for Surgical Residents

The project is small “crazy”. Maxim Ross himself recognizes this. This neurosurgeon, former head of clinic at Montpellier University Hospital, co-president of Revinax (a company specializing in virtual reality technology that he created in 2015), decided to film twenty operating techniques in real conditions. Learn in every specialty. Considering all surgical interns. Do the math: There are thirteen surgical specialties, making for over two hundred and fifty tutorials to shoot. A virtual reality headset will then allow these images to be viewed.

Why on earth did this doctor who could have had an academic career turn to entrepreneurship? Let’s go back to 2012. That year, Maxime Ross completed his neurosurgery internship in Toulouse. But there is no post of Clinical Manager available. The young surgeon then embarked on a sort of “fellowship tour of France” that took him from the Timon Infants Hospital in Marseille, through the Necker-Infants Malades Hospital in Bordeaux, to the Pellegrine Hospital Group in Paris, and finally to the Montpellier University Hospital, where he was offered a position as head of the neurosurgery clinic. came

“During my fellowship, this may seem surprising, but I assisted a specialist surgeon in his specialty several times during his last surgical operation before retirement. I witnessed this moment where he has complete mastery over gestures, He remembers. But how do you record the smallest details? How can you get as close to this perfection as possible when the point of view doesn’t match the lead actor? »

The question of transmission of good deeds through archiving began to run through his mind.

The idea is to place the intern in the same axis as the surgeon operating and no longer, traditionally, next to or in front of him. To do this, according to him, there is nothing better than to film exactly what the latter sees. He will be the cameraman. “Even if the intern does not gesture, the brain records the operation thanks to the activation of mirror neurons, brain cells that are activated when we do an action but also when we see someone doing an action”, Maxim Ross explains.

A stereoscopic film

The surgeon is equipped with a harness, starting from the back and mounted by the arms coming above the head, maintaining a stabilization system on which two cameras are attached which film in 3D and at 180 degrees. The videos from the two cameras are synchronized and stitched together to obtain a stereoscopic film. The film is then edited, divided into chapters according to different operational phases and supplemented with additional data: medical imaging sections, three-dimensional anatomical objects.

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