This UC San Diego Professor Planned His Surgery In Virtual Reality – KPBS
By David Wagner / Science & Technology Reporter
Contributors: Kris Arciaga / Video Journalist
Published March 9, 2017 at 4:01 AM PST
UC San Diego’s Larry Smarr is the kind of guy who wears a Fitbit, monitors his sleep and has had his DNA sequenced. But he takes the whole self-tracking thing farther than most. He has mapped his internal organs in three dimensions. He even has a 3-D printed model of part of his colon — the part cut out in a recent surgery.
“Just this amount of my body was out of control,” Smarr said, clutching the plastic replica. “And to be able to actually hold it was very empowering.”
Smarr has an inflammatory bowel disease. When he learned that part of his colon needed to be surgically removed, Smarr got to wondering: If 3D graphics are increasingly being used to bring video games and other forms of entertainment to life, why could they not be used to help protect his life?
In an unusual approach to this kind of operation, Smarr and his surgeon decided to use 3-D imaging in the planning and execution of his recent colon resection surgery. They said the experiment was a success. And now, the man known for evangelizing the concept of the “quantified self” is on a mission to popularize the idea of “quantified surgery.”