Cincinnati Children’s Hospital: Innovating surgery planning

Collaborative virtual experiences can be applied to many scenarios, and in the case of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (CCH) they’re developing ways to enhance and improve surgical procedures. Whilst developing their program, CCH required technology that allowed them to rapidly create an accurate anatomical digital twin to enable surgery planning and aim for better outcomes.

Along the way, CCH expanded their program to include patient and caregiver education, as well as sharing their findings with a global surgical community to ensure the continuing development of best practices.

Check out the video above, and the highlights below, to find out more.

Top reasons why CCH chose Unity

Dive into a few of the key reasons that CCH chose Unity as the tool to build their immersive training program:

#1 Speed of development

In time-critical medical situations, the ability to be able to respond in real-time with an accurate 3D visualization of a specific patient’s anatomy is essential.

“The real time aspect of the game engine is probably the most important piece for us because often we will get a request from a surgeon the day before they have a surgery, or we have a critically ill patient requiring an emergency operation. So we have to move fast. We get an imaging study done, we create a 3D model that we get into the platform and into the surgeon’s hands as fast as possible. So that real time component is probably the most critical piece for us.”

#2 Inclusive experiences

Ensuring the visualization platform is accessible, providing an environment where patients and their families can interact with medical professionals to gain an understanding of procedures and minimizing pre-operation stress:

“We create content that we use for our patients and our families to be able to better understand their condition and help them to treat it. We even get our patients into the VR headset and they will help us plan out their surgeries. We're able to level the playing field between what we understand and what they can understand. It is just a phenomenal thing to be able to have a kid in there, to be able to understand what's going on and be side by side with their surgeon, helping to plan out what their operation is going to be.”

#3 Global collaboration

Collaborating in real-time, whilst viewing a detailed physiological digital twin of a specific patient’s anatomy, empowers medical professionals to share learning and aim for the best outcome for their patient:

“Virtual reality allows surgeons from around the world to have the tools to interact in an environment pretty seamlessly. Being able to work together to plan out a child's operation, and very much personalize it, but also have that global perspective of what would you do in this scenario compared to what have you done in the past?”

Benefits of Unity for immersive training

Increase workforce knowledge, skills and competency with immersive, real-time 3D training experiences. Engage workers from any location with interactive content they enjoy and retain.

* (PwC study)