In the world today there are roughly five billion people without access to safe surgical services. Surgical diseases cause more deaths than HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria combined. The digital surgery platform ‘Touch Surgery’ is an interactive surgical simulator for healthcare professionals. The technology provides realistic and detailed guides to every step of a procedure which can be used to learn how to perform surgeries, test knowledge and rehearse for a surgery.

Touch Surgery is now being used all over the world and has recently launched a Virtual Residency Program for surgery students. This program provides access to innovative training programs that can help improve surgical outcomes and the standard of care patients receive.

The surgical app takes users through over 150 simulated surgical procedures with realistic 3D rendering. The user can cut, stitch, implant and anything else required. The goal is to improve the level of surgical skills worldwide, particularly in areas where surgical procedure is poor.

Recently Touch Surgery has raised $20 million to develop a new medical training tool using the Microsoft HoloLens. This tool called Go Surgery gives trainees a live video feed of a professional surgeon, overlaid with virtual guides on how the surgery is performed, with step by step guides holographically projected onto the scene.

Co-founder Dr Jean Nehme and Dr Andre Chow say it is still early days for this technology however they are determined to make augmented reality and virtual reality key technologies in the operating rooms of the future.

The concept of Touch Surgery and the software components associated to creating such an innovative and state of the art platform are considered to be Research and Development. The company is therefore eligible for a significant rebate on its R&D expenditure. The available tax relief on R&D activities is very generous and should be utilised, to find out more contact a Swanson Reed R&D specialist today.