Medical simulation platform FundamentalVR raises $20M to help surgeons learn through VR
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/medical-simulation-platform-fundamentalvr-raises-20m-to-help-surgeons-learn-through-vr/
FundamentalVR, an immersive simulation platform for medical and health care professions, has raised $20 million in a round of funding to “accelerate skill-transfer and surgical proficiency” through virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) applications.
Despite its decades-long promise, VR hasn’t traveled too far beyond gaming circles or niche industrial use-cases, though this is something that Meta and its Big Tech ilk are pushing aggressively to change. However, among the industries that have long embraced VR are medicine and healthcare. By way of example, back in 2009, a neurosurgeon in Canada used a VR-based simulator to carry out a dry-run of a real brain tumor surgery in what was thought to be a world’s first at the time. More recently, VR has been used in all manner of health care scenarios, from treating social anxiety and other mental health conditions, to surgical training.