The future of surgical training could be virtual if Stéphane Bordas and his team succeed in their goal of creating innovative new tools to help train surgeons. The team were awarded a €1.3m grant from the ERC in 2012 for Bordas’ RealTcut (reality cut) project, which will run until 2017.

Bordas, a professor of Computational Mechanics at the University of Luxembourg, and a European Research Council (ERC) fellow is working with a team of researchers at Cardiff University to create realistic simulators to help prepare for tasks such as cutting soft tissue in real time. This can be fraught with difficulties, so any assistance, either real or virtual will be welcomed by surgeons.

Bordas said: “The ultimate goal is to be able to simulate surgical cutting for the first time in quasi real time, thereby allowing trainee surgeons to hone their skills in a virtual environment before beginning work with live patients.”