Facilities

Northwestern Center for Advanced Surgical Education (N-CASE), which includes the technical skills lab and Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) training facility, continues to be the link between the clinical enterprise and the research and education activities of the program. Here, new technologies and techniques are developed, and physicians and hospital personnel gain valuable training experience that increases their efficiency and effectiveness in the operating room.

The facility houses an inanimate technical skills laboratory and virtual training room that include:

• 4 inanimate skills stations where trainees can develop surgical skills aided by laparoscopic video equipment
• 4 virtual reality simulators that provide computer simulation of real anatomical systems; trainees can perform operations on simulated systems and observe the effects in real time
• Mist-VR
• ProMIS by Haptica
• GI-Mentor & Angio-Mentor by Simbionix
• 4 computer work stations
• Trauma Man
• Emergency Care Simulator by METI

The facility houses a surgical training suite that includes 6 operating room stations where trainees can perform minimally invasive surgical procedures utilizing the same video equipment available in an operating room on cadaver or live specimens, and 1 operating room used for telerobotic surgery training and team training.

The space contains a state of the art video conferencing room, skills lab, and training operating room. This allows trainees to observe live human surgical cases performed in the hospital operating room as well as provide the opportunity for trainees to practice the procedure they are observing in the training operating room.