VheaRts In Action

Prof Andrew Cook was able to remotely deliver his congenital heart disease anatomy lectures for his UCL MSc and iBSc course during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, without sacrificing the quality of the education, using VheaRts.

In another first, paediatric cardiologists and surgeons in Johannesburg, South Africa were able to seamlessly attend a virtual workshop on congenital heart disease with Prof Andrew Cook in London without the time and cost of in-person meetings and without disrupting their clinical services.

The parents of Oscar, a patient undergoing a procedure to correct craniosystenosis (by implanting springs in the skull to facilitate expansion), were able to enter a shared virtual room with surgeon Owase Jeelani. This allowed the parents to visualise and interact with Oscar’s own skull model, and have the exact surgical steps explained to them in a visual and easy to understand way. In this instance, VheaRts was shown to be useful for reducing procedural anxiety and enhancing the consent they were able to give to the clinicians.

In a landmark surgery in Brazil, surgeons separated a complex case of conjoined twins whose neurovasculature was intricately shared between the two children. Using VheaRts, the surgeons were able to easily visualise all of the structures and their spatial relationship including the skull, brain and vessels. With the suite of VheaRts tools to interrogate the various cuts that needed to be made, surgeons had increased confidence of what they would encounter in the surgery and in how they would approach it. The twins were successfully separated.

VheaRts delivered four full days of oversubscribed virtual anatomy lectures at the 2023 World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiothoracic Surgery in Washington DC. More than 30 participants at a time entered an interactive anatomical lab session in VR, guided by UCL professor Andrew Cook who conducted a series of 8 workshops on congenital heart abnormalities. Over 500 recorded clinicians were able to try the application. Attendees voted the virtual reality one of the most exciting features on the conference schedule.