Monthly Archives: December 2018

DUBAI, 18th December, 2018 (WAM) -- Dawoud Al Hajiri, Director-General of the Dubai Municipality, on Monday launched a smart training centre, which offers hands-on training using the Virtual Reality Environment. The Smart Training Hub, supervised by the municipality’s Geographic Information Systems Centre, is considered the first-of-a-kind in the Middle East for the city planning and engineering industry. With the Smart Training Hub, the municipality aims to enable trainees to learn the techniques and mechanisms used in urban planning and the methods of building supervision and control. The techniques of the centre will also enable the trainees to implement the urban planning rules and the setting up of building regulations as well as performing the land surveying tasks while they are inside the training room. Al Hajiri toured the training centre, where he was briefed by Mariam Al Muhairi, Director of GIS Centre, about the equipment and training programmes at the centre, which is unique for its use of the latest technology in training. The centre is equipped with high-end devices and tools that are used in VR technology, while the software was fully developed by the GIS Centre team. Al Muhairi explained that the training curriculum covers limited [...]

Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS unveiled the prototype of a virtual surgery trainer at MEDICA 2018 in November. “HandsOn.surgery” helps surgeons prepare for individual patient cases prior to surgery, and enables them to practice the surgery. Both the surgical placement of implantable hearing aids and the surgical treatment of tumor diseases require milling the petrosal bone. Operations on the petrosal bone are both challenging and risky for any surgeon, as the facial nerve runs through the bone there, concealed, and the tight access offers a particularly limited surgical view. Aspiring surgeons therefore need extensive training before they can routinely perform such difficult procedures. To date, training opportunities are limited to just a few specialized centers, making large-scale training impossible. The virtual surgery trainer supports physicians in their education and training and is expected to help minimize surgery time and the risk of injury. With HandsOn.surgery, surgeons can practice individual procedures in oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthopedics and other areas before the actual operation using the patient’s digital twin – at any time, as often as they want, and with no risk. The highly immersive HandsOn.surgery trainer enables doctors to see, feel and practice a [...]

Kitware added to its collection of open source toolkits with the first release of the interactive Medical Simulation Toolkit (iMSTK). The toolkit offers manufacturers and researchers all the software components they need to build and test virtual simulators for medical training and planning. “iMSTK, which we’ve been developing in close collaboration with Professor Suvranu De’s research center — the Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — is meant to empower developers to rapidly prototype virtual simulator applications,” said Andinet Enquobahrie, the director of medical computing at Kitware. Virtual simulators can help practicing surgeons, medical students, residents and nurses to rehearse or plan surgical procedures such as biopsies, resectioning, radiosurgery and laparoscopy without compromising patient safety in the operating room. Medical simulators can also help accredit potential surgeons in basic skills for laparoscopy, endoscopy or robotic surgery. To aid the development of medical simulators, iMSTK brings together 3D medical image processing plus modeling and simulation. More specifically, iMSTK works hand-in-hand with 3D Slicer and the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) to segment a medical scan, derive 3D models from the segmentations and use the models for interactive physics-based simulation and photorealistic rendering. [...]