He breathes.
He has a pulse.
He blinks.
Stan?s pupils even dilate if you shine a light on them ? unless his programmers decide he?s had severe brain trauma.
Described as a “$250,000 Ken doll,” Stan ? short for Standard Man ? helps battlefield surgeons in training prepare for the real thing or keep their skills fresh, right here at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
The medical center Wednesday unveiled its Maryland Simulation Training and Innovation Center ? a high-tech classroom for surgery students and shock-trauma workers in the University of Maryland Medical Center?s former surgical center.
Calling it the future of surgical training centers in the United States, Director Adrian Park said, “there aren?t many that are actually physically embedded in a hospital.”
When they moved the surgical center into the new Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center, Park said, they deliberately left two fully functioning operating rooms in the old facility.
“When we try to bring new technology in and assess them, it?s a fairly realistic in terms of the noise, machine noise and background noise,” Park said.
The center includes the military triage center where Stan lives on a slab, as well as multiple laproscopic surgical simulators and another facility dedicated to improving physician?s endurance by finding better ways to conduct eight- and 10-hour surgical procedures. Doctors are also perfecting high-resolution computerized imaging from MRI machines that can provide lifelike images to surgeons at three times the resolution of the best high definition television.
University of Maryland surgeons hope the center will expand the use of laproscopic surgery, which involves smaller cuts and improves patient recovery, as well as improving doctors? ability to endure such procedures, said Ivan George, director of advanced technologies.
“My hope is that out of this center, [technologies] will be developed that will help us better do what we already do or what we haven?t been able to do.”
