Surgify

Aspiring surgeons do not really get hands-on experience during their training. They mainly study their theory and shadow other surgeons during surgeries. As such, when it comes time for a medical student's first surgery, they often report feelings of a lack in confidence, translating to avoidable yet harmful mistakes during procedures.

Surgify solves this issue by leveraging AR to develop a simulation for students to practice surgery. The project is an iOS app which has two modes: Surgery and Walkthrough. In the surgery mode, the phone will display a 3D model of a brain with a tumor. Students can use their fingers to simulate surgery tools such as tweezers and scissors to properly extract the tumor. There is a Gemeni-assisted chat feature to help guide the students when they make mistakes and answer questions. In the Walkthrough mode, students can explore various organs in the human body and learn more details about them. They can interact with more detailed 3D models as well.

One of the most unique benefits of Surgify is its accessibility. It requires no external hardware. All an interested student would need is a phone, and they can immerse themselves in the surgery experience. Other similar solutions require hardware like VR headsets, which are often too costly for the average customer.

Due to Surgify being an iOS app, it was built in Swift. To use AR, we built 3D models of various organs such as brains, kidneys, lungs, and hearts to use in our project. We leveraged ARKit as it is compatible with the Swift interface. We also implemented a Gemeni chat feature through an API call to assist students during their simulated surgeries and to act as an educational tool that can answer questions in a conversational manner.

We plan to take Surgify forward by supporting more types of surgeries. We envision a scenario in which a medical student can practice hundreds of different surgeries that simulate countless scenarios, all to provide a comprehensive training metric that is risk-free.