To show the effects in real time on a screen, you have to do the calculations in one thirtieth of a second. To create the illusion of actually wielding a scalpel or hook— using a device that simulates actual motion and resistance, analogous to the joystick on a flight simulator—requires reducing the lag time to one thousandth of a second. Essentially, you’d need to put the power of a supercomputer into a desktop. Cutting thinks this will be achievable, using multiple parallel processors and new algorithms Teran is developing, within a couple of years. “You could have a patient in a small town scanned while a surgeon in the city practises the surgery,” Teran says. “The patient then flies out for the operation.”

And none too soon to help Iraq War veterans who, thanks to improved body armour, are now surviving attacks that would have been fatal in earlier wars, but are left with severe wounds. Many other specialties could benefit as well, including cardiac, cancer and orthopedic surgery, and Cutting’s own field of cleft-lip and -palate repair; there are 40,000 cleft babies born every year in China alone. “No two traumas or birth defects are the same,” says Teran. “The surgeon makes a plan to repair the damage, only nothing goes according to plan.” Better, in that case, for the virtual patient to bleed on the screen—than the real one in the operating room.
-Jerry Adler (Newsweek)