Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has received a multimillion-dollar gift from a local foundation to fund the continued build out a virtual surgical platform – one that draws parallels to the popular 3D game Minecraft. The doctors leading the effort at the medical center say the technology could prove a medical game-changer.
The Turner Farm Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Indian Hill’s Turner Farm, donated $2.7 million to Cincinnati Children’s to expand its use of virtual surgical planning technology. Dr. David Morales, a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Dr. Ryan Moore, a pediatric imaging cardiologist, lead the team building the virtual reality platform within Cincinnati Children’s Heart Institute.
Moore and Morales said the project is a six-year effort and counting. Its team to date has raised roughly $4 million in funding, including from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Ohio Third Frontier, through its technology validation and startup fund.
The Turner Farm Foundation gift will fuel the buildout of a surgical “metaverse,” a virtual-reality space where multiple surgeons and cardiologists from around the world can interact, partner on and plan out procedures in real-time.
Moore and Morales said it marks a natural progression. “It gives us the umph to get it over the finish line,” Morales told me. It also could forever change how physicians practice medicine.
“It’s like when we used to just call friends on the phone and talk, and now we have Zoom. You can’t call anymore. This is the next step,” Morales said. “This will change the pace of medicine. We have a platform and specific tools for congenital heart surgery, but the idea is you can swap the specific tools and do (this for any) procedure.”
Children’s building a ‘medi-verse’ to plan complicated pediatric cardiac procedures
Morales landed at Cincinnati Children’s from Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, another mainstay on the U.S. News & World Report best hospitals list. He cited Cincinnati’s focus and investment in innovation as a key factor for the move. “At another hospitals, we’d probably have to raise $8 million to $9 million to do this,” he said.
For Moore, he always had an interest in the gaming industry and originally went to school for digital arts – before pivoting to focus on pediatric cardiology. “I always wanted to marry the two things together,” he said.
In the VR platform, doctors can practice different surgical techniques using a replica of their patient’s heart, made from more than 1,000 slices of imaging data, all in an immersive, 3D space using a VR headset.
They can place a patch, commonly used in pediatric cardiac surgeries to close holes or to enlarge arteries and valves, or position any medical device. Those can be imported into the environment, Moore said.
The metaverse component, or as Moore calls it, “medi-verse,” mirrors a social gaming network like Minecraft. The idea is for doctors around the world to access the platform together using VR and work with Morales – or any other surgeon – to explore and plan procedures together.
A translation tool is also built in, allowing physicians from around the world to communicate.
Morales said improving care – and access to care – is key.
“We do a lot of surgeries we may see once every two years, or once in a career,” he said. “Imagine if you can go into the metaverse, call up some friends and say, ‘Hey, look at this, how can we fix this and figure it out?’ And then go to the family and say, ‘This is the best plan for your child – and it isn’t just built on our expertise, but from people around the world.’ That’s very powerful.”`
From a surgical standpoint, the ability to “walk through the heart and see it from behind, those are things I can’t do even in surgery,” Morales added. “And the education part, unlike jet pilots who simulate, our teaching is people watching and learning on the job. We’re better than that. There’s only 10-15 congenital heart surgeons that graduate a year across the country, and only 10 continue to practice because it is such a tough field. We should be able to create a system where people can practice ahead of time and see different ways of doing things.”
‘We want to be part of it’: Turner Farm funds will push medicine forward
The Turner Farm Foundation is working closely with Moore and Morales – along with experts at Unity, a San Francisco-based game engine company – to roll out the technology. The Cincinnati Children’s team also includes eight in-house developers.
Turner Farm itself is one of three working farms in Indian Hill. It was established in 1994 by Bonnie Mitsui, whose birth name was Mary Elizabeth Crudgington.
The Turner Farm Foundation has backed a number of causes in recent years with a focus on health and wellness. Most recently, it created an endowed chair position in 2020 at the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Integrative Health and Wellness.
“When we learned about what Dr. Morales and Dr. Moore are doing, we knew: These are the people pushing medicine forward, and this is how they’re doing it. We want to be part of it,” Chuck Mitsui, son of Bonnie Mitsui, said in a news release.
Currently, the tech is being tested at five alpha sites. That count will expand to 10 to 20 in the beta phase. Cincinnati Children’s plans to “push the frontier” with that rollout, Moore said, introducing the platform in countries with what’s considered low to medium technology resources.
The demand is high, he said.
Eventually, the plan is to spin off the concept into a new business venture. That exact timing is not known, but new Turners funds will help in the push.
“There are going to be naysayers. It has to be seamless and easy to use,” Morales said. “That is a very important thing to both Ryan and I.”
