PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A training tool developed locally will help future doctors and medical personnel save lives during childbirth.

C-Celia is a one-of-a-kind, lifelike “manikin” used to teach students at the Drexel University College of Medicine to perform caesarean sections before seeing a real patient.

Dr. Owen Montgomery, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology, says the device allows a surgery resident “to actually do a caesarean using a knife and cutting through tissue and delivering a baby, just as if it was happening in the real world.  Simulation allows us to put residents in situations where they need to prepare for the future.”

Second-year resident Roxanna Irani said it was like doing the surgery for real.

“It was kind of a fun surprise to get a scalpel and, rather than be saying, ‘Okay I’m going to cut into the abdomen,’ to actually get to do it,” she said.

The damaged parts are repaired or replaced, and C-Celia is ready for the next procedure.

Source.

Three hundred ailing patients, some shrieking in pain from severe burns, others suffering quietly from chronic illnesses, packed into a ballroom Friday at the Brazos County Expo waiting for care from 170 bustling student caregivers.

"When we do our simulations, the key is to make things as real as possible," said Jerry Livingston, faculty coordinator for Disaster Day, an annual event coordinated by Texas A&M Health Science Center nursing, medical, and pharmacy students. "The phrase that is used in the industry is 'suspend disbelief.' So if you suspend disbelief and you get people in the moment, you can see how they take it seriously."

The concept for Disaster Day, a mass casualty disaster training exercise, came about after Hurricane Ike when health care students at Texas A&M were asked to help with disaster relief.

Laura Livingston, assistant director of the Clinical Learning Resource Center within the Health Science Center, said former HSC president Nancy Dickey saw during the hurricane the need for disaster training.

"She asked the colleges to design a drill or some sort of training, and it's grown every year," Laura Livingston said. "Today is a complete and total miracle of organization."

What began with 20 students with their ailments written on paper and stuck to their limbs has turned into a realistic simulation with hundreds of students, including participants from the Blinn College nursing, radiology and EMS programs.

More than 300 volunteers sprawled on cots or strapped to gurneys acted out an injury or sickness to allow students a realistic experience in serving critically injured patients.

The disaster exercises were held in two stints, each for an hour and a half.

More.

Eight-year-old Perry moaned in pain as doctors rushed to his bedside. His grandmother demanded answers of the physicians clapping electrodes to his chest. But things were going downhill quickly, and the half-dozen doctors and nurses in the room focused on threading a tube down Perry's windpipe and shocking his stalled heart back into action.

Then, as Perry's vital signs stabilized, a voice bellowed over the emergency-room loudspeakers: "Scenario over." Perry, a computer-powered manikin, shut down, and the staff filed out of the ER.

That scene, on a recent afternoon at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System's medical simulation center, is part of the latest in medical education at hospitals and medical schools: increasingly sophisticated simulations that offer hands-on training, much of the intense pressure of hospital work, and none of the risk.

Part robotics and part theater, these simulations combine ever more lifelike manikins and other technology with stagecraft. Perry is a boy-size medical manikin with a pulse, breathing sounds, blinking eyes and the ability to spurt blood on command.

But the manikins aren't the biggest innovation in medical simulation. Rather, it's the re-creation of lifelike experiences for doctors and nurses. That's where the stagecraft comes in. "Grandma" was an actress from Long Island. In another simulation at the Lake Success, N.Y., center, a nurse planned to give a $70,000 manikin a skin infection by gluing honey-filled bubble wrap to its leg.

The goal is to inure doctors to the tense situations they'll face in real-life hospital wards and emergency rooms. That means juggling technical skills with angry family members, malfunctioning equipment, short-handedness and unpredictable medical complications. To that end, modern simulation focuses not on rote memorization, but practicing teamwork in real time.

More.

Community supporters, elected officials and administrators gathered Thursday, Dec. 13 to celebrate the second building affiliated with the UCR School of Medicine.

Visitors toured the School of Medicine Education Building that has been renovated and transformed with a medical simulation laboratory, a 100-seat lecture hall, 10 patient examination rooms and small group discussion rooms. It includes a wall in the entryway that has been dedicated to Thomas and Salma Haider for their ongoing support for the School of Medicine.

“This facility is not merely a building, or a node in the network of campus research, it is the builder of dreams, a vehicle to serve the urgent needs of our community,” said Chancellor Timothy P. White in what is one of his last official appearances at UC Riverside before he goes to lead the California State University system. “From this building will emerge dozens of physicians trained on the ground in this area – many of them local residents, who understand the experiences and the cultures of their patients.”

Founding School of Medicine Dean and Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs G. Richard Olds described the simulation lab, where students, much like airline pilots, will learn and practice their skills on patient simulators created to mimic medical conditions and scenarios they are likely to encounter in the practice of medicine.

“Yes, this building has lecture halls, but our lecture halls will be used to a lesser degree than traditional medical schools,” Olds said. “Instead, we devoted a larger amount of square feet to small rooms, we call them Problem-Based Learning rooms, where students will actively solve problems, gaining and applying medical knowledge as they will need to when they become practicing physicians.”

Former State Assembly Member Wilmer Amina Carter noted that the mission of the UCR medical school to diversify the local physician workforce and to improve the health of people living in the region is consistent with the needs of Inland Southern California and the state. “This is a stunning achievement for the campus, its supporters and the community,” she said.

Former State Senator Denise Ducheny, whose former district included the diverse and medically underserved eastern Coachella Valley, spoke of her desire for the area’s youth to receive their medical education at UCR and return to serve their communities. “Four years from now I will come back for the (first) graduating class,” she said.

More.

Some New York neurosurgeons soon will perform medical procedures while looking through special optics and holding instruments that are connected to a computer.

When surgeons gently touch their tools to the brain, they will feel its pliable tissue. The organ will pulsate in time with the patient’s heartbeat.

But the patient, like the brain in this scenario, is not real. They’re both virtual.

In October, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York received a virtual reality neurosurgery simulator called NeuroTouch to improve health outcomes and reduce complications in patients undergoing neurosurgery. It is thought to be the nation’s first virtual reality brain surgery simulator, said Christie Corbett, a Mount Sinai spokeswoman.

While simulation exercises have been used to help train medical students during the past two decades, the technique increasingly is being implemented among practicing physicians, medical experts say. The intent is to allow doctors to hone their skills and practice new medical procedures.

At Mount Sinai, NeuroTouch is being used by neurosurgery residents. Within the next three months, staff neurosurgeons are expected to start practicing procedures on the simulator and eventually rehearsing specific operations that are scheduled for a later date.

“We believe the new brain surgery simulator could potentially revolutionize the way we train and evaluate our surgeons,” said Joshua B. Bederson, MD, chair of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “We hope to improve the safety and speed of surgery and to reduce the duration of training. This could translate into better outcomes for our patients.”

More.

Laura Fitzpatrick: My very first patient died — twice.

Less than a week after our White Coat Ceremony — the symbolic start of our medical education, in which we donned short white student coats in front of faculty, friends and family — I, along with a dozen other first-year medical students, am training in basic cardiac life support.

Our mock clinical scenario: an elderly woman (fortunately, a mannequin, whose vital signs the EMS instructor makes up as we go along) collapses in a ShopRite supermarket, aisle 3. Unresponsive, she has stopped breathing. We check: no pulse. The instructor is quizzing us on the emergency response protocol. Then he asks a different type of question: “Is the patient dead or alive?”

This is just the type of conundrum I am eager to chew on with my new classmates. It’s of a piece with the ethical, emotional and big-picture issues we’ve already started exploring with faculty lecturers — and with each other, in the dorms and in cafes near campus — during orientation week. What is the definition of “dead” or “alive”?

“That’s a complicated question,” one student ventures. But this is, after all, a clinical class — time for skills practice — and the instructor wants an answer.

Most of us choose “alive.” The correct answer, he informs us, is “dead.”

“That’s what cardiac arrest actually means,” the instructor deadpans. “We just don’t tell that to the families.”

He moves on quickly to show us the proper hand placement for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, and explains how to use the defibrillator. But I’m unsettled. Unlike the patient, a plastic-and-foam mock-up, the defibrillator paddles are the real thing, capable of delivering 200 volts in a fraction of a second: enough energy to stop the heart.

More.

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — The largest class so far at University of Central Florida's medical school began its first year on Monday.

Fifty-five men and 45 women make up the graduating class of 2016, and while it took substantial work to be able to earn admission into the school, the real work has yet to begin. The class size is seven times larger than UCF's inaugural class four years ago.  Every one of the incoming medical students will train at UCF using medical simulation tools, which essentially are just video games.

The school is already one of the top universities in the nation for game design, which is poised to create a massive job boom in the metro area, and medical simulation could make it one of the top spots in the nation. Many of the simulations will be built by graduates of the school's video game design school, which according to the Princeton Review, is ranked fourth in the nation after Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Being able to simply hold up a device like this iPad and focus on the poster and have it come to life," said David Metcalf, of the UCF Institute for Simulation and Training.

And future employment for game designers is booming.

The VA is set to open a major medical simulation center in late 2013, which will train thousands of VA technicians across the nation.  The coming Creative Village will become a hub of game design and medical simulation work and will bring in hundreds of jobs for designers. And then there are the more than 150-plus companies already in the area largely doing military simulation that are also moving into healthcare, making it a $11 billion a year industry.

"Can this be the largest producer of medical simulation in the country?" WFTV asked.

"We have the potential to be that. We're certainly poised to do that," said Randy Shumaker with the UCF Institute for Simulation and Training. 

On average there are currently 150 job openings in the city for game design and development. And the jobs are high-paying. A 22-year-old graduate will average $50,000 the first year out of school.

Source.

Sleep-deprived surgeons can perform a previously learned task or learn a new task as well as surgeons who are rested, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. However, in sleep-deprived surgeons, the brain must work harder, which could lead to problems during unexpected events.

The researchers reached these conclusions using simulations to study the effects of sleepiness on surgeons.

"Particularly in surgery, simulation has become the introduction to many procedures for new residents," said Jonathan Tomasko, M.D., a research fellow involved in surgical resident training. "Coupled with an 80-hour work week restriction, simulation is becoming increasingly important to ensure an adequate level of skill prior to operation on a patient."

While published research using simulation to determine the effects of sleep deprivation on surgical skill exists, the results do not agree with each other.

"Interestingly, these reports conflict with the results of sleep disruption on non-medical simulated tasks," Tomasko said. "The ability to fly a plane, operate a locomotive and drive an automobile have all been shown in studies to be significantly affected by sleep disruptions. Two such studies showed impairment in simulated performance equivalent to moderate blood alcohol levels."

Researchers in this study, published in American Journal of Surgery, tested two groups of medical students -- one sleep deprived and the other rested -- over two days. All study participants were shown how to use a virtual reality simulator on the first three levels of difficulty. They practiced for no more than 45 minutes a day. Researchers instructed study participants to get a full night's rest and then tested the subjects on the first three levels of the simulator.

The researchers introduced an unexpected task in the test to increase the brain's workload. Students were asked to count the flashes of a yellow disc on the screen while performing the task and then report the number of flashes at the end of the round.

Participants returned for a second day of testing either fully rested -- no less than six hours sleep -- or sleep deprived -- less than two hours of sleep. A majority of participants scheduled their testing on a pre-arranged, 24-hour call shift during their surgery rotation to better approximate the effects of performing surgery at night while sleepy.

More.