2023 Surgeons and Engineers: A Dialogue on Surgical Simulation

Thank you to all who attended the annual Surgeons and Engineers: A Dialogue on Surgical Simulation meeting on Wednesday, March 1, 2023. This full-day in-person meeting had notable success. The meeting attracted 88 registrants from the U.S. and 7 other countries. Nine highly scored abstracts were selected and presented as oral presentations, and 27 abstracts were presented as poster presentations.

The keynote address, “Therapeutic Principles for Bridging the Surgeon / Engineer Culture Gap in MedTech,” was delivered by Pierre E. Dupont, PhD.

Dr. Dupont is the Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering and holder of the Edward P. Marram Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is also a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. His research group develops medical robots, implants, and imaging technology. He is an IEEE Fellow, a former Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and a member of the Advisory Board for Science Robotics.

The Special Panel on Surgeons and Engineers: How to Build Better Surgical Simulators included a surgeon educator, an academic engineer, and an expert from the surgical simulator industry. The panelists included Gladys Fernandez, MD, Baystate Simulation Center, Thenkurussi Kesavadas, PhD, University of Albany, and John P. Lenihan, MD FACOG, Surgical Science.

A workshop session in the afternoon addressed the fundamentals of Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and what important roles the CTA could play in simulator development. The session was led by David Hananel, BSEE, BACS, University of Washington, and Victoria Roach, PhD, University of Washington.