The Next Medical Frontier — Teaching Surgery in Virtual Reality

Marion Surgical brings virtual reality to surgical education, with realistic haptics, to surgeons and residents around the world. Haptics is the science and technology of transmitting and understanding information through touch.

Marion Surgical develops and sells simulators that combines virtual reality and a proprietary surgical robotic system to create immersive life-like surgical simulations.

To enhance their training technology, they wanted to add multi-user capabilities. This could include advancements such as having a surgeon teach a trainee how to perform surgery inside of a mixed reality environment with both participants in different locations; or having a surgeon and other members of a medical team, such as an anesthetist and scrub nurse, collaborate inside of a mixed reality environment over a network.

Their simulator uses virtual reality and haptic robots where low latency and real time performance is critical. With the help of the ENCQOR 5G test bed at MaRS, they were able to develop and test their technology on a 5G network. As a result, Marion Surgical are now optimized to run multi-user collaborations on a 5G network.

Marion Surgical are already looking toward the next horizon and are currently developing a new simulator for conducting pediatric congenital heart disease rehearsals and will be adding 5G telementoring functionality to this new offering.

“Being able to do this kind of remote training with participants from around the world is where the future is, and that will be possible with a world-wide network of 5G.”

Ben Sainsbury, CEO, Marion Surgical.