![]() One will be the anaesthetised patient, the other a braindead donor. ![]() ![]() ![]() He describes it to me in detail: the operating theatre of the near future, where two bodies will be clamped tight in special frames. Barring the end of the world, nuclear explosions, meteorites.”Ĭanavero has a very clear picture of this surgery in action, having outlined it in two TED talks, in a keynote address delivered last summer at an American conference of neurosurgeons, and in a book, Il Cervello Immortale (The Immortal Brain), published next month in Italian and English. With the Chinese “providing the hospital and personnel”, his operation will be ready to go sooner than anybody might have expected – as early as Christmas 2017, he thinks. The Harbin Institute of Technology will provide assistance, he says, as will Harbin Medical University, which has made him an honorary professor in anticipation. He tells me that, after lengthy negotiation, it will take place in China, in the northern city of Harbin. With Italy out of the question as a host nation, he has had to look abroad for somewhere to stage his surgery. “I’ve become a pariah,” he says, making sure I notice the frosty reception he receives from some of his former colleagues in the neurology department. Last February, he and the hospital that had employed him for so long agreed to rescind his contract. And, Canavero says, the Italian medical establishment turned against him. A medical ethicist writing in Forbes called his proposal “rotten”. Canavero’s plans were publicly criticised by at least one international church. Then he went and caused “the brouhaha”, as he now calls it – publishing papers on head transplants in the medical journal Surgical Neurology International, giving TED talks in Limassol and Verona, making headlines, becoming that “celeb”. Canavero arrived as a medical student in the 1980s, and had been employed on its wards for much of his professional life. He once thought the first head transplant would be performed here, at the hospital in Turin. “Head transplantation, body transplantation, whatever,” Canavero says as we walk around the busy hospital. It might be best understood as a “body transplant”, but the wider world has tended to settle on the more sensational phrase. In medical terms, it would be a cephalosomatic anastomosis, the first of its kind. After that, as Canavero explained in academic papers and speeches, he planned surgically to attach the first head to the second body, fusing the spinal cords so that the owner of the first head might enjoy the functional use of the second body. One would be alive, with an ailing body (a paraplegic, say), the other newly dead or doomed (perhaps the braindead victim of an accident). Update: : This article has been udpated as a previous brain surgery was recorded in VR earlier in 2017.Earlier this year, Canavero became famous around the world when he enlarged on plans, long cherished, to remove the heads of two people. "If we can get some emergency neurosurgency coming in through the front door, seeing how that is initially treated and then going up to the operating theatre that would be another good step," he says. By helping to film the 360-video with the hospital and NHS Trust, FundamentalVR says it is the first step for it to build a VR training tool for the brain aneurysm procedure.Īlamri is now planning more experimental neurosicence videos, both in VR and conventional formats. The firm has developed a VR system that allows people to conduct virtual surgeries and uses haptic feedback to provide real-time responses to what surgeons feel during procedures.Ĭhris Scattergood, one of FundamentalVR's cofounders, says the company is aiming to build a "flight simulator" for surgeons that allows them to "practice and feel the tissue types" involved in multiple scenarios. The company's technology was featured at the 2017 WIRED Health conference. In this case, the VR film was produced by London-based FundamentalVR. ![]()
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