Using technologies from the gaming industry to improve medicine

Unfortunately, not every medical procedure is 100% successful. Due to the complexity of breast cancer lumpectomies, for instance, 16–25% of surgeries fail to remove the entire tumor, requiring patients to repeat the procedure. But to improve surgery success rates, and their efficiency, physicians are now looking to technologies from a surprising source: the gaming industry.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Bruce Daniel, a professor of radiology, explains how technologies developed by the gaming industry, such as virtual reality and body tracking, can be used to improve medicine. With host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Daniel also discusses how the potential of these technologies goes beyond surgeries, even helping patients manage anxiety before undergoing stressful diagnostic procedures like MRIs.

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Related: Bruce Daniel, professor of radiology.

Related: Russ Altman, the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, of genetics, of medicine (general medical discipline), of biomedical data science and, by courtesy, of computer science.