Cryosurgery, placing cryoprobes in cancerous tumors to instantly freeze and kill them while still inside the body, is a new technique to fight cancer, but training new surgeons in this technology is difficult because of the potential to destroy healthy tissue and cause other potentially deadly complications.  Carnegie Mellon Mechanical Engineering professors Yoed Rabin and Kenji Shimada have created a virtual surgery training simulation with the help of a $1.3Million grant from the National Cancer Institute to make training much safer and easier.

Dr. Shimada, in a news release, said the process will allow surgeons to place probes without risk to patients, visualize frozen regions with intuitive 3D computer graphics and benchmark their performance with hundreds of cases stored in a database. “It is a motivational and effective way of learning and improving their surgical skills,” he said.

via CMU expert works on tool to train cryosurgeons.

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