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Locally developed heart simulator could hit US market
Ross Sheil, Online Coordinator rsheil@jamaicaobserver.com
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A heart surgery simulator developed in Jamaica is now being marketed in the United States by a leading American heart surgeon.
Dr Richard Feins, Chairman of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery (ABTS), has hailed the technique as 'revolutionary'.
Developed at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona the 'Real Heart' project uses a pig heart, inflated by balloons to simulate a beating human organ, held inside an artificial cavity. The process speeds up training since it allows students to work on a real heart - a pig's is anatomically similar to a human's - rather than the current alternative, which is to observe between 500 to 1,000 surgeries.
"It provides a tool for the master surgeon to create a training session using a real heart and it also provides real time vital signs," explained Dr Daniel Coore, head of Mathematics and Computing, UWI, who developed the software, one of several persons who workedon the Cardiac Surgery Training Project.
The project was the brainchild of Dr Paul Ramphal, a heart surgeon at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), faced with needing to better expose trainees to the real life procedure.
"While we were able to perform all of these procedures on human patients in Jamaica (and did so many times), limitations in resources such as intensive care facilities and staff meant that we couldn't do large numbers of procedures, and therefore our trainees were not seeing enough procedures to properly learn to do them," said Ramphal.
However, the prototype had been dismantled after it was initially developed in 2005 due to lack of funding needed to take the project further. That was until Dr Feins typed 'heart surgery simulators' into a web search engine late last year.
"The Internet version of this paper had two video clips of the simulator and I was instantly impressed with how real it looked and with its potential application to surgical training," said Feins. "I might also add, that for the last two years, my youngest son has been in the United States Navy in naval flight school, training that makes heavy use of simulation and I have become convinced that we could significantly improve surgical training if we could get the right simulators."
He funded the team - which also included Richard Craven from the United Kingdom who was responsible for the electrical engineering on the project from his time at the University of Technology (UTech) - to construct another simulator earlier this year. He has since been promoting it in the US, confident that Real Heart will become standard in heart surgery training.
"It is the hope of the ABTS to provide the support necessary, both financially and professionally . I believe that as long as all parties involved remain committed to developing this product for the sole purpose of helping cardiothoracic surgical education, there is no limit as to how successful it could become," said Feins.
To watch videos of the Real Heart simulator in action, visit the Jamaica Observer 'Observations' blog: www.jamaicaobserver.com/blog
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