App lets doctors practise surgery using smartphones
British app developers Andre Chow (left) and Jean Nehme are surgeons by training and co-founders of Touch Surgery, a mobile surgical simulation platform that allows surgeons to rehearse on their phones or iPads before entering the operating theatre. They showcased the app at Founders Forum Smart Nation Singapore 2015 held at the Raffles Hotel. Photo: Jason Quah
It was dubbed one of the rising stars at yesterday’s forum attended by leading digital entrepreneurs. Its founders are surgeons who left their jobs after they saw the impact their surgical simulation app was making worldwide.
Touch Surgery allows surgeons to learn and rehearse operations from their smartphones before stepping into operating theatres. Launched about three years ago, it now has over 300,000 users and over 50,000 hours of simulated surgery content.
Showcasing the app at the Founders Forum Smart Nation Singapore 2015 yesterday, British co-founders Andre Chow, 35, and Jean Nehme, 30, said they were working with the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC) on simulations for surgeries to treat cataracts and glaucoma. Content for the two procedures should be uploaded in three to seven weeks, with the potential for more.
The collaboration began after SNEC approached Touch Surgery, and Dr Chow said his team was working with adjunct associate professor Shamira Perera.
Touch Surgery has also worked with experts from Duke, Yale and other universities. The team does an in-depth interview with the experts to understand every decision they make during surgery, then combines the information with its virtual human body and ensures the content is correct before it is uploaded, said Dr Chow, who is trained as a general surgeon.
He and Dr Nehme, a plastic surgeon, quit their hospital jobs after the platform grew. “We both feel we can impact so many more patients’ lives by using technology, as opposed to practising individually as surgeons,” said Dr Chow.
It was a tough decision nonetheless. “Medicine is a very conservative profession. It’s not easy to take a step out of it to do something different,” he said.
Dr Chow boasts another link to Singapore. His mother, Dr Chen Mien Hua, is Singaporean. She graduated from the National University of Singapore’s dentistry school and is now based in the UK, where she pursued postgraduate studies and met Dr Chow’s father. NEO CHAI CHIN
