How can medical students practice surgery without placing patients at risk? Stanford surgeons and computer scientists are working together to create a hands-on surgical simulator with an incredibly realistic sense of touch.

The project received special funding from Bio-X, part of Stanford's Initiative on Human Health. Bio-X brings together faculty from biology, medicine, engineering, and other fields so they can join forces to benefit patients.

About the Initiative on Human Health

Progress in improving human health in the last 100 years has been astonishing—the invention of radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer, the mapping of the human genome, the first human heart transplant, among others. But the issues we face today have increased in complexity and magnitude—the emergence of avian flu and new bacterial viruses, the limitations of known antibiotic therapies, the ongoing challenges of chronic disease, and autoimmune disease, for example. Progress in the next 100 years will require marshaling the expertise of researchers from a variety of disciplines and expediting the translation of discoveries from the laboratory to the patient's bedside. These are the goals behind Stanford's Initiative on Human Health.

About Bio-X

Bio-X was launched in 1998 as an incubator for pioneering research in the biosciences. The program has been instrumental in galvanizing the scientific community at Stanford by facilitating and encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration among many researchers and scholars. In all, more than 300 faculty members from across the university are affiliated with Bio-X. Representing some 50 departments, these faculty members have contributed significantly to a new spirit of entrepreneurship and partnership that is the hallmark of the program.

The work of Bio-X focuses primarily on four key areas: (1) imaging and simulating life from molecules to mind; (2) restoring the health of cells and tissues; (3) decoding the genetics of health and disease; and (4) designing therapeutic devices and molecular machines.