ROYAL OAK, Mich. – Virtual reality technology is making brain surgery safer and helping to explain complicated procedures to patients.
Neurosurgeons at Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital in Royal Oak are using Surgical Theater’s XR visualization platform to analyze and plan a patient’s case before surgery.
The technology combines 2D images from MRI and CT scans to create a virtual brain that allows doctors, patients, and their families to “fly” through it, using a VR headset. It also allows surgeons to plan and practice their surgeries.
One of the patients benefiting from the technology is 5-year-old Halyn Fromer. Halyn was born with a rare genetic disorder called tuberous sclerosis.
“She has tumors on her brain, heart, and kidneys, and the brain tumors cause epileptic seizures,” explained her father Alan Fromer.
Halyn originally received seizure treatment in Ohio, but her parents were told there was better technology to help their daughter in Michigan. They moved to Fenton to be closer to this new virtual reality.
“It’s literally like a video game,” said Alan Fromer.
“It’s a 3D image of the inside of her brain, and it’s so amazing because you can see that terrible tuber and you can see where Dr. Serrano was able to place those lasers around the tuber so that he could laser around the entire piece and help her that way, and you could see it light up red where the seizures were coming from,” said Heather Fromer, Hayln’s mother.
Dr. Cesar Serrano is a pediatric neurosurgeon and director of epilepsy surgery at Corewell Health Children’s. He took me on a virtual tour of Halyn’s brain.
“We are looking right now at Surgical Theater technology that has been really useful to help to have a more precise type of epilepsy surgery, or in general, brain surgery,” said Serrano.
It’s been particularly helpful in becoming familiar with the patient’s brain before ever picking up a scalpel.
“When I open the skull and see the brain, I already recognize what I saw before, exactly the same,” said Serrano. “I can show you that exactly where we found the problem was in that green area is what we identified as abnormal on the MRI.”
In terms of planning, he’s able to see the abnormality relative to essentially invisible neural pathways.
“The lesion is away from important motor tracts, like the blue tract that you see behind is the motor tract of the patient,” said Serrano.
When it comes time for the actual surgery, he’s able to see these invisible virtual reality images superimposed on the patient’s actual brain using a surgical microscope with augmented reality.
“We can use this technology to be more precise, to have reconstruction of important motor tracts or eloquent tracts in the brain, and avoid any lesion with those,” explained Serrano.
After Halyn’s surgery, her parents couldn’t be more pleased.
“We are on week three of no seizures. We have had three weeks of no seizures in five years, so it’s amazing,” said Heather Fromer.
Serrano started out mainly using the surgical theater with his epilepsy surgeries, but he’s become so confident in its application that he says he now uses it with most of his non-epilepsy cases as well.