Cool Toys

One great thing about medical school is the cool stuff you get to use. In the basement of the medical school building, we have a medical student lounge. There are always two students playing on the ping pong table and we get a lot of mileage out of the air hockey table. On thursday this week, however, we got a really cool new toy. The director of the clinical simulator got his hands on a laparascopic simulator. It’s a combination of high and low tech. The simulator has many of the same instruments used in laparascopic surgery, including hemostats, forceps, clamps, and a stapler. There is a light and camera combo which is just like the real thing, (imagine a magic wand with light and camera at one end and a focussing ring at the other). The whole thing is wired into a tv screen so you can watch yourself on the TV just like in a real OR. The low tech part comes with what we can do with the instruments. The instruments are inserted through holes in the top a wooden box, inside of which is another board with screws, nails, and other objects screwed into it. There are lots of beads and washers and rings and such that you are supposed to practice manipulating with the laparascopic tools. Several factors make this difficult. Having good depth perception can be hard since the screen is 2D and the tools are in a 3D environment. Also it can be difficult to tell what position to put the tools in so that they can most easily manipulate the articles inside. Since you’re working with essentially a long lever, the directions are reversed too. If you move your hand to the right outside the box, the box itself acts as a fulcrum to move the distal end of the tool to the left. You yourself can complicate things by changing the angle of the camera as well. You can rotate it 360 degrees, so you can put the “bottom” of the box on the “roof” if you want, just to test your mental agility. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad they put it in the lounge. I love playing with it, the manual challenge is pretty interesting.