Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Joeana Cambranis Romero
PhD candidate, Faculty of Engineering
Video games to save lives: Navigating the Body with Virtual Reality
I develop “video games” to assist surgeries. Yes, you read it right. I’m a PhD student from Mexico, and I am part of an amazing research lab that develops special tools to help surgeons perform minimally invasive procedures to perform therapy without traditional surgery. In our lab, we use virtual and augmented reality technologies when developing these tools, like creating a video game to navigate inside the body! My work focuses on liver cancer. Currently, I am developing a navigation system that includes a virtual laser line to show the surgeons where a therapeutic needle will end up before it is inserted into the liver to treat the cancer. I use virtual reality, math and lots of engineering to achieve this! I hope my work can enhance surgeons' confidence when performing any kind of needle insertion, by helping them navigate around delicate body parts, reducing patient trauma in the process.
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