Fundamental Surgery has announced the expansion of their Global Medical Panel with Yousuf Khalifa, Ivan Wong, and Areena D’souza as their latest members. In their roles, they will they will provide scientific and clinical guidance in the development of additional surgical education and training platforms.
A respected expert in ophthalmology, Khalifa will provide scientific and clinical advice regarding Fundamental Surgery’s platform to offer ophthalmology surgical simulations. Wong, current president of the Arthroscopy Association of Canada and a professional with a wealth of experience in educational development within orthopaedics, and D’souza, an experienced orthopaedic spinal surgeon, join the team to create and enhance the platform’s orthopaedic simulations. All will work with the Global Medical Panel to guide the strategic development of the platform, educational content and simulations.
“Fundamental Surgery relies on the world-class clinical insight from medical professionals to ensure our mission of providing safe virtual spaces to learn, practice, rehearse and assess surgical skills and knowledge to medical professionals and trainees around the world. I couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Dr Khalifa, Dr Wong and Dr D’souza to our Global Medical Panel to help us continue this effort,” said Richard Vincent, founder and CEO of FundamentalVR. “These individuals are all leaders in their respective fields and will enhance our offerings to surgeons and trainees, which in turn will better surgical performances and improve patient safety and outcomes.”
Named as one of the best inventions of 2018 by Time magazine and 2019 winners of the SXSW Innovation Award for VR/AR & MR, the Fundamental Surgery platform was launched in August 2018. It combines virtual reality with cutting-edge haptics to create a scalable ‘flight simulator’ experience for trainee and qualified surgeons, allowing them to experience and navigate the same visuals, sounds and feelings they would during a real surgical procedure.
Today, Fundamental Surgery is deployed with a number of medical institutions including Mayo Clinic and UCLA in the USA, UCLH in the UK, and Sana in Germany with initial training packages focused on the orthopedic surgical disciplines. The procedures it currently supports include Spinal Pedicle Screw, Total Hip Arthroplasty (Posterior), Total Hip Arthroplasty (Anterior) and Total Knee Arthroplasty. All Fundamental Surgery simulations are accredited by the Royal College of surgeons as an activity that demonstrates sufficient educational value to contribute to individual surgeons’ CPD, for which 6 CPD points can be claimed.
