The educational potential and comfortability of virtual reality in healthcare were revealed during an invasive surgery at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City, according to a recent report by ABC, KSAT.  

The team of surgeons, including Edward P. Quigley III, MD, PhD, from the University of Utah Medical Center, used virtual reality for a patient's surgergical planning. The man had displayed lumps on his forehead, which turned out to be a growth in his eye socket, steadily growing back toward his brain.  

By using virtual reality, Quigley and his team were able to not only enhance surgical planning, but to educate the medical team and patient before surgery, ultimately reducing surgical time and overall time in the operating room. It also increased comfortability among trainees and residents.  

“We talked about components that surgeons or trainees would want to see, like they would want to see a potential blood vessel or where the optic nerve was or how displaced something was. So that sort of changed how we selected the components to put to build into the model,” Quigley said.