SHANGHAI, November 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, at the Siemens Healthcare booth at the 6th CIIE, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University and Siemens Healthcare China signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two sides will jointly explore the scientific application and medical transformation of metaverse visualization surgery in anterior lateral femoral valve transplantation. Wang Chao, director of oral and maxillofacial surgery at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University and Wang Chao, vice president of Siemens Healthcare Greater China, and others attended the signing ceremony.

According to the agreement, Siemens Healthcare will collaborate with Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital to develop a positioning and registration tool for anterolateral flap transplantation to achieve accurate implementation of anterolateral flap transplantation in the metaverse. Siemens Healthcare will also provide clinical disease research tools and develop corresponding disease bank clinical research forms and corresponding templates to meet the clinical research data collection and management needs of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital. At the same time, the two sides will conduct in-depth cooperation in jointly publishing academic papers, applying for patents, and carrying out applications for scientific research projects.

The Siemens medical metaverse solution integrates digital twins, virtual simulation, airborne exercises, and reality mapping technology to construct a mapping body for holographic images of patients. It is applied to various medical scenarios such as anatomical teaching and research rooms, multidisciplinary consultation rooms, patient communication rooms, and operating rooms, and redefines medical services.

In traditional surgery, doctors can only scan images before surgery and roughly estimate the location range of the lesion based on memory and experience. The operating table uses metaverse solutions to enable doctors to have a 3D perspective, like a projector, which directly projects the lesion on the surface of the body, helping doctors to accurately “trace” the surgical area and efficiently assist in diagnosis and treatment decisions. In September of this year, the nation's first visual flap transplant was successfully performed at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital. A 58-year-old patient was admitted to hospital for left-sided tongue cancer. The indications for surgery were obvious. However, since there is some variability in the blood vessels of the anterior lateral flap, traditional surgical planning alone cannot accurately find reliable penetrating arteries during surgery to ensure 100% success in flap resection. The team led by Director Fan Song of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital was the first in the industry to use Siemens Healthcare's metaverse medical education and research solutions to overcome this problem. By allocating hologram bionic reality rendering images to the patient's entity in real time, the doctor is helped to accurately outline the blood vessel movement in the anterior femoral surgery area on the patient's body surface, thereby realizing visual freestyle flap resection. In this case, the metaverse medical education and research solution greatly shortened the operation time, reduced surgical exploration incisions, and effectively increased the success rate of surgery.

“The successful implementation of the country's first case of visual flap transplantation is of great significance to the development of clinical research. In the future, we will also expand application scenarios such as visual navigation in operating rooms or catheter rooms and introduce them into routine clinical practice to benefit more patients.” Director Fan Song of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital said.

With its accumulation and advantages in 5G, VR, AI, etc., Siemens Healthcare took the lead in the industry in March 2022 to launch a series of comprehensive remote application support services based on 5G virtual cockpits, and exhibited a metaverse VR teaching and research workstation at the 5th Expo 2022, allowing visitors to experience the changes brought by innovative technology to medical education and research in a vivid and realistic interactive manner. In the early stages of the 6th CIIE in 2023, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital successfully applied Siemens' medical metaverse solutions to the research and exploration of flap transplantation surgery. At Expo 2023, Siemens Healthcare showcased innovative application scenarios for the latest cutting-edge metaverse immersive teaching and research platform. During the exhibition, the first hospital-side metaverse digital command center was launched at East China Hospital affiliated to Fudan University and will be used for in-hospital multidisciplinary joint consultation (MDT), doctor-technician training, and patient communication. The Siemens Healthcare Digital Command Center, which relies on Siemens Healthcare's 5G technology and metaverse immersive teaching and research platform, was officially put into use before the 2022 Expo. By the end of October 2023, the Siemens Medical Digital Command Center had covered more than 470 hospitals across the country, connected more than 760 devices, had more than 500 remote experts, and a cumulative service time of more than 1.9 million minutes.