Nationwide Children’s/OSU Researcher Showcases Medical Simulation Training at 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival

Dr. Gregory Wiet, associate professor of otolaryngology at Nationwide Children's Hospital and The Ohio State University, was one of the many leaders in technology who were featured during this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin this week.  Wiet, a leader in the use of advanced, touch-enabled medical simulation applications for training, was part of a panel discussion titled “Stop the Bleeding! Immersive Simulations for Surgeons.”

Touch-enabled medical simulations are seen as a better way to train the next generation of surgeons worldwide.  In fact, in some studies, the lowest-performing students in a surgery simulator outperformed the highest-ranked students trained by traditional means. 

Dr. Weit is an NIH/CDC-funded researcher focusing on the application of high-performance computing within the field of otolaryngology – head and neck surgery. Specifically, his interest centers on the development of a simulation environment for teaching specific surgical techniques in otolaryngology. He was awarded a National Institute of Health R-21 preliminary grant to develop a surgical simulator for temporal bone surgery and recently was awarded a $1.6 million RO-1 grant from the NIH to continue developing the system during the next five years.

Dr. Weit and his colleague, Dr. D. Richard Kang, both pediatric otolaryngologists from Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Ohio State University, recently used a touch-enabled temporal bone surgical simulator developed in conjunction with the Ohio Supercomputer Center to train Nicaraguan ear/nose/throat (ENT) surgical residents as part of a humanitarian initiative.

For more information, see the release from Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

Learn more about the panel discussion at SXSW Interactive.