XR AI Spotlight The Future of Surgery: Digital Twins and VR
Mar 25, 2026
Dr. Ryan Moore, pediatric cardiologist and Chief Emerging Technologies Officer who leads in‑house AR/VR, robotics, and AI teams. He describes building a Unity/Unreal gaming lab inside a hospital. He discusses VR surgical planning that creates patient‑specific digital twins from CT/MRI. He covers adding longitudinal models, real‑time blood‑flow simulation, and agentic AI to support surgical decision making.
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Pediatrics Serves As The Toughest Testbed
- Pediatrics with complex conditions acts as the 'Formula One' testbed where solutions must handle the hardest cases.
- Building for these patients means the tool often generalizes to broader populations and reveals tough edge cases early.
Donation Brought Unity In To Build Surgeon Focused VR3S
- With a $2.7M donation Cincinnati brought Unity in to co-develop VR3S, their VR surgical simulation, focusing on surgeon workflows.
- They prioritized user research: "Users matter" and built surgeon-focused UI/UX with in-house developers.
Start With The Clinical Problem Then Personalize
- Start by defining the clinical problem to personalize care rather than chasing tech for its own sake.
- For surgery that meant shifting from generic planning to patient-specific digital twins and personalized patch/device design.