Satava Award for Advance Technology in Medicine

Professor Anthony Gallagher is honoured with a Prestigious Award. We are proud to collaborate Tony who constantly strives to push boundaries for better medical standards using innovative VR technologies.

Satava Award for Advance Technology in Medicine
MMVR22 April 7 - 9, 2016
Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown Hotel • Los Angeles, California

The 22nd Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference

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One of the premiere prizes in the area of advanced technologies in medicine has just been awarded to an Irishman currently working in the ASSERT Centre, College of Medicine and Health, University College Cork, Ireland.The Satava award was presented to Dr. Anthony Gallagher a Professor and Director of Research in the ASSERT Centre on Friday 8^th April at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) conference in Los Angeles, California.MMVR is the leading engineering and educational forum for researchers who invent, develop, and market interactive, information-focused tools for clinical care and medical education.

The Satava Award was established in 1995 and acknowledges the work of Dr. Richard M. Satava, its first recipient. It is presented each year to an individual or research group that has demonstrated unique vision and commitment to the improvement of medicine with advanced technology.Previous recipients have included work on the ‘Virtual Human’ project and the pioneering research of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (‘HIT Lab’) in Seattle.

Dr. Gallagher, received the award for his pioneering research on the application of virtual reality (VR) in minimally invasive and image surgery and endovascular interventions.Over the 20 years Dr. Gallagher’s research has demonstrated the power of VR as a training and assessment tool.As a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in the Dept. of Surgery at Yale University in 2001 he led the team that reported the first well controlled clinical trial on VR anywhere in the world.In a prospective, randomized, double-blinded study they showed that VR trained surgeons preformed the operation 30% faster and 6 times fewer intra-operative errors in comparison to conventionally trained surgeons. Recently, he has also completed the largest prospective, randomized, blinded, multi-centre (i.e., 21 ACGME centres in the US) clinical trial of simulation based with Arthroscopy Association of North America (AANA). The results showed that proficiency-based progression simulation training produced a 56% reduction in intra-operative errors and a 69% reduction in sentinel errors in comparison to traditional training

The results of these studies have had an enormous impact on surgical training in the US.The adoption of VR and simulation as a training tool represents one of the most significant changes in surgical and medical training in the last 100 years.

An Irishman from Belfast, Dr. Gallagher was educated at the University of Ulster in Belfast and Trinity College Dublin.On completion of his studies he was appointed as a Research Fellow and then lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast.In 1995 he became Director of Research of the Queen’s University Endoscopic Research Lab where he did much of his pioneering research on VR.

Dr. Gallagher said, “VR was always going to work.All I did was combine the technology with robust clinical science.The results were even better than any of us could have imagined.At the start of the 21^st century training on patients is no longer acceptable.Our research has shown that VR isn’t just as good as conventional training, it is orders of magnitude better.We can produce better trained surgeons and clinicians with no risk to patients.That has to be a good thing for everybody!” BUT, my research has shown that simulation based training must be more than an interesting educational experience. Effective simulation based training does not work by accident.

UCC professor wins prestigious award for pioneering virtual reality research

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