Just ask airline pilots, who use flight simulators to practice handling windshear. If the virtual aircraft is thrown to the ground by a severe downdraft, then nobody gets hurt. Not so in medicine, where gritty reality has been the teacher.
Surgeons learn by practicing on cadavers and animals, for example.
These imperfect methods can have costly side effects, such as medical complications in patients and even lawsuits over poor training. This success has enabled HT Medical to increase revenues substantially, attract millions of dollars in private investments as well as follow-on grants from other federal agencies, and nearly quadruple in size to almost 60 employees. All the attention is a testament to the new products' unusual levels of physical and physiological realism. We can also train practitioners who don't see a large number of patients to overcome the learning curve. The company's first ATP award, for a three-year project that ended in 1998, enabled HT to expand the functional range of the technology and package it into an authoring tool that could be used to quickly design models of human tissues.