Engineering Surgical Innovation Is a Joint Effort

A collaborative gathering of surgeons and engineers met last month at ACS Headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, to discuss the development and use of leading-edge simulation technology with the goal of enhancing surgical education and, ultimately, patient care.

Now in its fifth year, the 2024 Annual Surgeons and Engineers: A Dialogue on Surgical Simulation meeting drew more than 100 clinicians, engineers/scientists, educators, and others in an effort to spark innovation and build connections within this multidisciplinary community.

“There is a real need for us to get these communities together to move the surgical field forward,” said Ajit K. Sachdeva, MD, FACS, FRCSC, Director of the ACS Division of Education, in his opening remarks. “I think innovation will come from both the formal presentations and the informal discussions among the attendees.”

Simulator Competition and Panel Enhance Engagement

The DIY simulator/model competition—a new addition to the meeting’s programming this year—featured 20 participants who presented self-built simulation models. A panel of three expert judges from the ACS Division of Education’s Surgeons and Engineers Committee evaluated each simulator/model, and meeting attendees had the opportunity to vote for their favorite entry.

The first-place awardee was Ritika Pansare, from the Michigan Medicine 3D & Innovations Lab in Ann Arbor, for the “Low-Cost Oocyte Retrieval Simulator.” Jenny Garnett, from the University of Washington Institute for Simulation in Healthcare in Seattle, received the “People’s Choice” award for “Training Model for Cranial Burr Holes.” (Competition participants were not required to be surgeons or engineers, and entries from simulator/model companies were not accepted.)

A Special Panel—"How to Build Better Surgical Simulations: Part 2"—functioned as a continuation of a panel presented at the 2023 meeting and featured perspectives of a surgeon educator, an academic engineer, and an industry engineer.

The panelists included John T. Paige, MD, FACS, professor of clinical surgery and director of wound care at Louisiana State University in New Orleans; Ganesh Sankaranarayanan, PhD, associate professor of surgery and biomedical engineering at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas; and Henry Lin, PhD, a simulation learning architect at Intuitive Surgical.

Moderated by Gladys Fernandez, MD, panelists addressed queries tethered to specific “themes” or issues that emerged during last year’s Surgeons and Engineers meeting, including improving surgical education, the importance of standardization, the significance of multiorganizational large-scale validation, and why scoring is both a science and an art.

Creating a Culture of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The keynote address, “Developing an Ecosystem of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to Advance the Future of Surgery and Academic Medicine,” was delivered by Mark S. Cohen, MD, FSSO, FACS, a surgical oncologist and endocrine surgeon. Dr. Cohen also is dean of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana—the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine, as well as a founding professor of bioengineering in The Grainger School of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and senior vice president and chief academic officer for Carle Health in Urbana, Illinois.

Dr. Cohen’s presentation examined the current culture of innovation and entrepreneurship specifically through the lens of academic medicine and surgery, and provided models for how instructors can enhance the training of medical and surgical innovators in the future.

In 2022, Dr. Cohen partnered with the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, and University of Maryland to form the Center for Medical Innovations in Extended Reality (MIXR)—the first US National Science Foundation-funded center for medical innovation and extended reality (XR).

“The goal was to democratize how XR can be used to improve health and lead design development and deployment of these technologies,” said Dr. Cohen. XR encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

“But more importantly, our aim was to determine how to train the next generation—to build this workforce through medical XR,” he said. MIXR training modules focus on fasciotomy, inhospital cardiac arrest care, intubation, and nursing skills all with the goal of making challenging procedures safer for the patient.

As dean of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Dr. Cohen recently has been involved in another landmark educational innovation. At the end of 2023, the institution was selected as the first medical school in the world to integrate an augmented reality-based hologram system for use in its education and clinical programs. With this technology, live ultrasound images are fused with the system’s 3D holographic display to guide surgeons as they perform minimally invasive procedures.

To create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, according to Dr. Cohen, you need to:

• Understand barriers to the culture
• Pool resources (identify what resources currently exist at your institution and from the US government)
• Develop milestone-based programs to gain additional resources
• Create a curriculum that serves multiple verticals of learners—from students to senior faculty
• Recognize that a return on investment does not always equal money

The call for abstracts opens next month for the 2025 ACS Surgeons and Engineers meeting, which will take place in Chicago on March 19, 2025. Check the ACS website regularly for updates.

Tony Peregrin is the Managing Editor of Special Projects in the ACS Division of Integrated Communications in Chicago, IL.