Unreal Engine Helps Brain Surgeons Practice

Brain surgery might be one of the most challenging medical tasks a surgeon, so it takes a lot of training and practice, and it turns out that Unreal Engine can be of great help when you try to become a better surgeon.

In the 2018 paper Enhancement Techniques for Human Anatomy Visualization, Hirofumi Seo and Takeo Igarashi said that “Human anatomy is so complex that just visualizing it in traditional ways is insufficient for easy understanding.” To deal with the problem, Seo and his team have developed a practical approach to brain surgery using real-time rendering with Unreal Engine.

Their 2019 paper Real-Time Virtual Brain Aneurysm Clipping Surgery demonstrates an application prototype that allows to view and manipulate a CG representation of a patient’s brain in real time.

The goal here is to more accurately portray the brain’s structure and how it deforms during surgery. The software prototype, backed with a grant (Grant Number JP18he1602001) from Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), will help surgeons visualize a patient’s unique brain structure before, during, and after an operation.

You can learn more about the project here.