It is surely one of those, “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” moments. Gregory Lopez, M.D., an orthopedic spine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, has produced a low-cost surgical training simulator using items from the aisles of Home Depot.
Dr. Lopez, who did his fellowship at Rush, was accustomed to looking at the details of motor movements. He told OTW, “As a former baseball player, I routinely broke complex motor movements down into their fundamental steps. When I was in my orthopedic residency at the University of California, Irvine, I was surprised to find that there were limited avenues to practice surgical technique except for the occasional cadaver lab and synthetic bone exercises. My department chair (Ranjan Gupta, M.D.) at the time brought the idea of creating a simulator to help teach these skills. So we thought through the details of what we do in the operating room, as well as how to assess what we do. I went to Home Depot and bought pipes and drills and put it all together.”
“The simulator allows someone to perform basic drill control exercises. We use PVC [polyvinyl chloride] pipe to help participants limit plunging with their drill bit and use wood blocks to help teach drill triangulation and using the drill tip for directional feedback. On this simulator, trainees are able to drill multiple times in five minutes; whereas junior level residents may only have the opportunity to drill into bone a few times during the week. This is basic motor skill education; we are not teaching someone how to do a particular operation. It’s more, ‘How do I get my hand to angle in the direction I want it to go?’”
Before their tool, says Dr. Lopez, the only option for simulated training cost thousands of dollars. “Virtual reality, haptic feedback…these are exciting, but extremely expensive and thus out of reach for many training programs. With our simulator, the ‘Fundamentals of Orthopedic Surgery, ’ total construction cost is roughly $300 and the arthroscopy simulator is $75. With the arthroscopy trainer, users learn how to triangulate instruments, how to do fine motor touching, horizon changes, ambidexterity, etc. We use portals that are similar to those we use in arthroscopy.”
“The two simulators have been tested by three different residency programs and have demonstrated significant differences between novice and senior level training levels.”
The innovative research was awarded the scientific award of excellence two years in a row from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. The notoriety has caused many national and international programs to inquire about creating similar simulators at their respective center. Dr. Lopez created an instruction booklet on how to build and use the simulator. As indicated by Dr. Lopez, patenting these simulators was never the goal, it was to improve surgical care by providing a robust low cost training tool.
