Extended Reality in Pediatric Cardiology – PediaCast 572
Podcast: Download
Subscribe: RSS
Show Notes
Description
- Dr Arash Salavitabar visits the studio as we consider extended reality in pediatric cardiology. This involves creating a 3D model of a baby’s unique heart defect, wearing virtual-reality goggles, and then stepping inside to plan the procedure to fix it. We hope you can join us!
Topics
- Extended Reality in Cardiology
- Congenital Heart Disease
Guest
Links
- The Heart Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital
- Extended Reality Offers New Ways to View Congenital Heart Disease – Pediatrics Nationwide
- Virtual Reality Remote Collaboration for Preprocedural Planning of Complex Percutaneous Congenital Interventions: A Case Series
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of PediaCast is brought to you by the Heart Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to PediaCast. It is a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.
This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of Nationwide Children's Hospital. We're in Columbus, Ohio. It's episode 572.
We're calling this one Extended Reality in Pediatric Cardiology. I want to welcome all of you to the program. It is our final episode of 2025, and so I want to take a moment to just wish all of you a happy holiday season.
We have all of it ahead of us, you know, in terms of the various holidays that we all celebrate in one way or another throughout this season. And so however your family celebrates, I just want to say I hope you have a wonderful time with friends and families and really, you know, enjoy each other this holiday season. We will have much more content coming your way in 2025.
In fact, we are building in a bit more capacity for producing these programs. And of course, we would love to hear from you in terms of content that you would like us to cover on the podcast. We do have a contact page over at pediacast.org, and we would love to know what you want to hear about in the new year. And we'll try to get that plugged into the schedule if it fits with all the other things that we're doing and also considering perhaps what topics we have covered in programs in the last couple of years. We don't necessarily want to repeat things we've but if there is a way to maybe look at it through a different lens or approach it from a different point of view, you know, again, if you think, hey, I'd really love to know about X, Y, or Z as it relates to A, B, or C, and then we can try to really get a specific episode there for you. So, feel free to use that contact page.
Again, it's over at pediacast.org. So, what are we talking about today? Well, we have a really, really interesting episode for you this week.
As it turns out, 1% of babies are born each year in the United States with birth defects that involve the heart. So, this amounts to about 40,000 infants each and every year in the United States. And many of these babies need their heart defects corrected with surgical procedures, which until recently was largely accomplished with open heart surgery.
Many babies still need these surgeries, but many more avoid open heart surgery by having procedures done in the cardiac cath lab. And this involves inserting a tube called a catheter into a large blood vessel and advancing that to the heart and performing the procedure from the inside. And these techniques can patch holes, replace valves, they can place stents without the complications and recovery time associated with open heart surgery.
However, these procedures are technically challenging, and each baby's congenital heart disease is somewhat unique. So extended reality allows doctors to visualize a baby's heart and blood vessels with 3D imaging and virtual reality goggles, so they can look inside a particular baby's anatomy and plan the procedure before it actually happens. Of course, lots more details go into all of this, and we're going to share those details with you today on the program.
And we have a terrific guest joining us to explain where this technology came from, why it improves safety and patient outcomes, and how it all works. So, our guest today is Dr. Arash Salavitabar. He is a pediatric interventional cardiologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital.
He'll be with us shortly. Before we get to him, I do want to remind you the information presented in every episode of PediaCast is for general educational purposes only. We do not diagnose medical conditions or formulate treatment plans for specific individuals.
If you're concerned about your child's health, be sure to call your health care provider. Also, your use of this audio program is subject to the PediaCast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at pediacast.org. So, let's take a quick break.
We'll get Dr. Salavitabar settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about extended reality in pediatric cardiology. It's coming up right after this.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Dr. Arash Salavitabar is an interventional cardiologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He has a passion for the use of extended reality technologies in the practice of pediatric cardiology. But what exactly does that mean, and how does extended reality improve our understanding and treatment and learning and outcomes, particularly as these relate to congenital heart disease? Dr. Salavitabar will answer these questions and more, but first let's offer a warm welcome to our guest. Thank you so much for stopping by today.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate the invitation. It's great to be here.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, we really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. Before we get into the topic at hand, I wanted to define a couple of terms, first being congenital heart disease, and then interventional cardiology, just so folks kind of have a foundation for our discussion.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, thanks for that question. So we in our Heart Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital take care of patients across the lifespan, so anywhere from a premature baby weighing 500, 600, 700 grams up to adult-sized and adult-aged patients who are either born with or sometimes acquire heart disease of various types, whether it be a defect of a valve inside the heart, a hole within the chamber that shouldn't be there, vessels that are there that shouldn't be there, and many other things in between. So, we are able to treat those patients along that spectrum, and in interventional cardiology, we use less invasive ways of both diagnosing and treating those heart problems with tools that are going through vessels of the body with x-ray guidance and sometimes teaming up with our surgeons to do things in what's called a hybrid fashion. Our goal is to make these children and adults healthier with the interventions that we perform in innovative ways, hopefully.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. So the heart surgeons take the traditional route of cutting the chest open and getting in there and actually physically touching the heart, and the interventional cardiologist does it with the catheter in blood vessels that kind of snake up to the heart, and then you're able to close holes or place new valves or stents and those kind of things sort of internally instead of just on the outside of the heart.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
That's exactly right. We span the spectrum of being able to make small vessels bigger with tools that we have, like stents, as you mentioned. We can replace valves actually inside the body without having to do a full surgery, but in some situations, we end up doing something in between where we team up with our surgical team and perform combined procedures, but our goal in our cath lab is to do things in a way that impacts the patient the least in the negative ways and the most in the positive ways by doing all the various maneuvers that you just described.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And when you do the hybrid procedures, does the open-heart surgery folks visit your lab or does your lab visit the traditional operating room?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Actually, both. Our heart center very intentionally is created in a way that collaboration becomes easier so that we can optimize patient outcomes in any setting, and so our cath labs, our interventional cardiology suites are essentially set up as hybrid operating rooms so that if we needed to convert or use it as an operating room at any point, we could. In our operating room, our main operating room for our congenital surgeries, our surgeries are set up in order to perform hybrid procedures, so it has the x-ray screens that can come in and we can set things up for our team as well as the surgical team to, again, do what we need to do for the patients.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Does that sometimes happen in an emergency kind of situation where you're in the cath lab and, hey, we need the surgeon down here now, and also in the operating room, they may say, hey, we need the interventional cardiologist here now? It wasn't necessarily planned, but those resources are available.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
That's exactly right, and I tell this to patients all the time, is the benefit of being in a large heart center like the one at Nationwide is that we're set up to respond to nearly every situation at all times, and so our goal is never to be in a situation where we're unprepared to respond to either an emergent or urgent patient care situation, and so if we're in the operating room or in the cath lab or in the ICU, whatever it may be, we have the resources and the abilities to transform our environment and quickly adjust to the patient to provide the care that's needed.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, really amazing and important work that you guys all do. So then define extended reality as we think about interventional cardiology.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, it's an interesting term. It does describe a spectrum of terms, so you'll hear in the mainstream media virtual reality is becoming more and more popular. Virtual reality is basically the end of the spectrum where you're immersing yourself in a virtual world or a digital world where you're usually putting on a headset, you may or may not have controllers in your hands, and you are in that environment, you're interacting with virtual applications.
Augmented reality is the opposite end of the spectrum where you're actually bringing a digital object into your environment so you can see the things around you, but you may have a holographic image or some version of a holographic image in front of you that you're able to manipulate or at least observe. Mixed reality is a term that spans both where you're sort of something in the middle. You're bringing in virtual objects into your world, but you're actually able to interact with it, but then the object interacts with your environment.
So, for instance, bouncing a virtual ball onto a table that's right in front of you. And then extended reality is just a basket term that spans all those technologies together.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, and then how are these technologies used in cardiology specifically?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, the way I like to think about it is sort of within the three pillars of academic medicine, right? We have our clinical realm, education realm, and then scholarly research section. And so, what we strive to do is, of course, optimize patient outcomes within that clinical realm.
And extended reality technologies provide a couple of resources that don't exist in what we currently do. And that's how we've sort of, at least in the Heart Center's XR program here, at Nationwide, we've approached this in a way where we say to ourselves, what's the gap currently in our field? And then using this technology to fill that gap, rather than just saying, let's see how we can use this technology.
And so, within our clinical realm, especially in cardiology, we're doing a lot of visualization of 3D anatomy and 3D relationships in our mind. And we're doing this based off of two-dimensional representation. So, we're looking at a computer screen, we're looking at a slice of an image from a CT scan, and sometimes we're looking at 3D models, but we're looking at them on two-dimensional flat screens.
And so, what extended reality technologies do is it basically allows the opportunity to take a three-dimensional object and allow you to see it in those true three dimensions. You're able to manipulate it, walk around it, slice through it. You're actually able to dive into those models and look inside the heart and the vasculature to understand the best methods of understanding it.
But then on top of that, be able to plan the actual intervention that you're going to perform. So if we're doing exactly what you mentioned, which is putting a valve in or putting a stent in, we can actually do that with a virtual stent and a virtual valve library that we've created, put that into a patient-specific model from a CT scan in three dimensions and look around it, go into a vessel that may be three or four millimeters wide, but make it as big as this room and actually look inside that vessel to understand the best course of treating that patient's heart disease. Within the education realm, we're part of a multi-center, a couple of multi-center studies, and we're creating custom applications to teach our trainees and learners how to, number one, understand congenital heart disease with custom-made curriculum from virtual reality applications, as well as simulations of actual procedures that we can perform in the cath lab. And then, of course, from a research standpoint, we need to show in an as objective way as possible that these things work, that they're useful, that people can respond to them well and learn from them, and that it can improve patient outcomes.
And on top of that, be a leader in the field in terms of showing that it is feasible to do these things. It's a comfort level that doesn't exist within either heart center or within each person, and so we're striving to be leaders within that. And within cardiology, it's been a growing field, for sure.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And I would imagine this is particularly important in the face of congenital heart disease because not everyone's heart defects are the same, and so they may be very unique to an individual. And so, you can't necessarily go to a textbook or watch videos of previous operations necessarily because it's going to truly be unique.
And so, this really allows you to take a CT scan, convert that into a 3D model, put on a headset, and actually walk through that particular child's congenital heart disease before you ever get into the operating room or the cath lab.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, that's so true, Mike. I tell parents, your child's heart disease, while we are experienced as a heart center and seeing each type of heart disease, it's all in the end of one. So that patient is at 100%.
They're no longer a statistic when they're in front of us. And their heart is like their fingerprint, and so we have to adjust to their fingerprint. And if we just look at every single patient with a congenital heart lesion the same, we're not doing that patient justice.
And what we need to do is what you mentioned, which is take each patient as an individual and each heart condition, each anatomy, each pre- and post- procedural state as its own entity and adjust to its twists and turns and take its punches and do what we need to do to make it a successful outcome.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Nationwide Children's Hospital has a publication for pediatric providers called Pediatrics Nationwide. And there was an article in there recently called Extended Reality Offers New Ways to View Congenital Heart Disease. So, if folks want to read that, we will have a link in the show notes over at pediacast.org for this episode 572. And just in print version, it has sort of in-depth explanation of all of this. So be sure to check that out. Again, you'll find the link in the show notes.
Now, as we think about this 3D model and putting on a headset and interacting with it, it sounds like a video game. Is that where these technologies first began?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, it's so fun. You know, starting sort of more recently, the fun thing about the technology itself is that it's being born out of industries that are very different than medicine, but have correlates to medicine. So currently what we see in the mainstream media is, you know, companies like Apple and Meta and all these companies that are popularizing virtual reality when it pertains to communication and watching movies and social media, etc.
Where it was all first born out of was a cinematographer back in the 1950s who basically created this setting where you could enter it, sit on a vibrating chair, see a movie, see a color, actually sometimes includes smell, and create this experience that is the same concept in many ways as what virtual reality ended up being or at least extended reality technologies ended up being. And what ended up happening over time is that person created the first head mounted display. And then, you know, organizations like NASA, for instance, created this platform for virtual reality where they could basically train pilots to understand different flight situations and simulate flight situations and be immersed again in that environment in a controlled way so that when they entered an actual flight situation that they were already trained how to respond to it as if they were already doing it outside of that event. The gaming industry sort of took over that over time.
And, you know, the younger generation is now routinely putting on virtual reality headsets to play video games. And all this became very popularized over time. And what we've done is a field of business engineering have taken on this platform to further their initiatives as well.
And then medicine has latched on over the last several years and has, again, taken that sort of mindset of how can we use this technology to benefit all the things that we do, again, taking the gaps that we have and filling them in. But the beauty of it is that a lot of that was born out of other fields. And now it's our responsibility to understand how we can take this emerging technology and make it part of what we do in a way that benefits all of our all of our important initiatives.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As you were speaking, I thought of an analogy that, you know, may help parents understand something that different but is also very important. When, you know, NASA astronaut, obviously, you don't necessarily want the very first time that they interact with controls and figuring out how things work and maneuver in space, before they actually do that in space and potentially put their life in danger by practicing, they're getting ready for the real thing in an environment that simulates it, you know, very closely.
And the same thing can be true, can be said for the way that vaccines work, right? So, you know, instead of an aviator, we have the immune system, right? And the vaccine is like the virtual reality where you're presenting the immune system with something to train, and then it's ready for the real thing when it comes along.
So, it's kind of like, kind of like an immunization.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, I love it.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This is how, you know, these are the cogs in my brain that are going as my guests are talking. What then are some challenges in bringing extended reality specifically to the healthcare environment?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, there are a few. I mean, logistically, you know, you're bringing something into an IT environment that's very intentionally and appropriately as an emphasis on patient privacy, the security of a network and what integrates into it needs to be protected. So, that's one part of things that we work closely with our hospital IT specialists and try to make this the safest initiative that we can possibly make it while benefiting our purposes of including extended reality technologies.
More importantly, though, what we want to do is make sure that we are not going in blind and saying simply, we want to include this technology. What we want to do is figure out whether this is the right thing to do for our patients. We want to take it and say, not quickly, it's not the right thing, but how can we make it better for what we do on a regular basis and then find either the conditions that it applies best to, the types of patients it applies best to, the types of procedures that it benefits the most.
So, the challenges become we have to challenge our mindset to, number one, step a little bit out of our comfort zone to apply this in the right situations and figure out what those right situations are, then step back and say, is this the right thing? Are we compromising patient safety? Are we making procedures longer or shorter?
Are we trying to take on things that we shouldn't take on? And so, those are the challenges. And those are honestly the challenges of any new technology, not specifically extended reality.
When there's a new device on the market that promises great results, we always have to critique ourselves. We have to say, number one, let's step out of our current comfort zone and give this potential device a chance, but then we also have to check ourselves and say, is this the right thing? And are we having the outcome we actually want?
And that applies to this, but every technology that we use.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. In terms of preparing for a particular procedure and really literally diving into a child's unique anatomy, walk us through that process. Is that something that happens days ahead of a procedure?
Does it happen right before you go into a cath lab? And is it something that you could reference during the procedure?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
We are in a great spot as a heart center and as a hospital system in that we have a great group of people that have become part of this heart center extended reality program that have allowed us to build an infrastructure that allows for timely success. And so, there's a group called the Pear Lab that does 3D segmentation for the heart center, which basically, that means taking CT scans, MRIs, and creating high-quality 3D models for various reasons, not just for extended reality uses. I have an extended reality coordinator, Mark Dutrow, who has done great work with some of the integration into the heart center workflow.
And then, of course, we have a team of people that have adopted this technology in their practice and for their preparation of either procedures or decision-making from a medical standpoint. And so, when a CT scan is done today for a patient, if we know we want to take that data and create a 3D model out of it, that can be done within minutes to hours by our 3D segmentation team with good communication that ends up happening on a regular basis and they're wonderful with that. We end up taking that data and then creating a certain type of file that can be used within the extended reality platform.
And then, what we do is basically go down the hallway. We've had our leaders of our heart center have invested in physical space, which is an extended reality lab for our heart center. But we walk there, we can sit down at that station and see that model, dive right into it.
And what we've done is we've accrued over time a library of virtual stents and valves, but they can also be made in real time by our segmentation team. And then, what we do is the personnel then becomes very important in sort of the knowledge of the patient, the specific patient, the anatomy that's being described, being able to take those devices and stents and plan out that procedure and sometimes on the fly make those plans. But that close relationship and multidisciplinary team becomes really important in that process.
A lot of that happens before the procedure. I've published a couple of papers on the concept of using these technologies within the procedural space while a patient's on the table. And I think there's merit to that thought.
I think that what we need to do is we need to see some advancements in the technology and how it can be used within a procedure so that it's not burdensome, it doesn't take a lot of time out of the procedure. And I think we're still as a field figuring out how to use that technology best within the procedure, but there are ways to do that. And they can be quite valuable.
We just have to, over time, figure out the best ways to get that done while the patient's in the room with you during your procedure. Whereas right now, we're doing a lot of it before the procedure starts and while we're speaking to patients in a clinic space.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And the publication that you published that you were speaking about, you were the lead author in the Journal of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions. And we'll put a link to that article in the show notes as well. So, if folks are interested in learning more about how you use this technology to plan a procedure and a little background information I imagine is in there as well.
What about in the exam room with patients and families? Can you use this technology to sort of show them what their child's heart and vessels look like and describe to them exactly what it is that you're going to do during the procedure?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, you know, it's such an interesting part of this whole program and the concept of using these technologies. I remember thinking back to my early part of my career when I was first starting out and first learning how to teach parents about their child's heart disease or patients about their own heart disease. And what that always entails is one of two things.
It's you're either drawing the heart structures on a piece of paper with your hand or you're printing off a generic version of what their heart is from a series of diagrams that we have online. Plus, or minus maybe showing them their CT scan which is, you know, it takes years and years to sometimes understand what that even means on a computer screen. And I remember at that this is another gap like I was referring to is I was saying to myself, you know, we take years and years to understand this congenital heart anatomy.
We sit in big conference rooms as huge teams and think about patient anatomy and discuss it and debate it and come up with a consensus. But it takes hours of very experienced minds coming together to make that possible. But then we walk over to a clinic space and then we expect parents to understand what we understand within 15-20 minutes.
And that's really not fair, right? And so, what I imagined is, again, the gap being is what if I could find a way to bring within minutes their patient's heart, their child's heart or the patient's heart into the clinic space, into the ICU, onto the floor unit and be able to actually look at that image in three dimensions with the family member or the patient and not just have them see it, but have them interact with it. So, what we've done is we use augmented reality headsets and we're performing a study on this right now where we enroll patients, and they can wear a headset and we as a provider wear a headset.
It's a type of headset where you can actually see your entire environment, so it's almost like wearing a large set of sunglasses that go over your head. And what it does is through an application, sort of like an application that's on your computer, you can actually take that patient's heart model, 3D heart model, and project it as a holographic model inside the clinic space or in the room in the ICU or wherever else it may be. And what we can do is with your fingertips, not any joysticks or controllers, with your fingertips you grab that holographic model, you can zoom it up as big as you want, you can make it as small as the palm of your hand, and we can actually walk around it and interact with it as provider and patient and family.
And I really feel like what that was beneficial for is creating a relationship that was more engaging, creating an experience that allowed for a better understanding. And so far, anecdotally, we've received a lot of great feedback, but we are studying this and haven't had the results divulged to us quite yet, but that will be out as a publication in the near future. We're going to hope to show, again, where is this beneficial, where is it not beneficial, where do we have areas of improvement in the technology, but where can this improve what we already do on a regular basis so that we're not expecting patients to understand all these complex things in a 15-minute span when we could be doing better and we should be doing better.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then in terms of training future interventional cardiologists, has this technology started to appear in fellowship training programs?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, so we're involved in two big projects that allow for that concept to become reality. And so, one is a multidisciplinary study where we are evaluating a virtual reality curriculum where it's meant to educate both trainees and or patients and family members, but more specifically for trainees, on the components of what's called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. So, when you're born with the left side of your heart being extremely small or absent and really only relying on one half of your heart and the steps that we go through to manage those patients surgically and medically and understanding that in a very organized fashion.
So not simply taking a patient's heart and looking at it but going through a curriculum that teaches trainees what that actually means and assessing their knowledge base based on that. And so, I think that'll add a lot. What we're doing here at Nationwide Children's is teaming up with another institution, actually the University of Michigan, to come up with a joint application that does that for another congenital heart lesion.
So, it's going to be a custom-made application that allows for trainees to learn it in a very structured way. Here, homegrown, what we're going to do, and we are doing currently, getting close to a finished product, is basically we've recreated in a virtual space our cath lab here at Nationwide. So, you can enter the actual virtual cath lab with a patient on the table and actually go through the steps of putting together a valve, as in putting out together the delivery system for a valve that we would place, and actually virtually implanting it into the patient with an x-ray screen with a patient in front of you.
And what we've done is we've incorporated into that the ability to do something more than just see and go through steps. We've actually incorporated the concept of muscle memory. We all end up, especially with procedural work, when we want to train someone, we want to learn how to use our hands.
We want to know where our hands go. We want to practice that with as much reposition as possible. And so, we've incorporated something called haptic glove technology, which is basically putting on these gloves that can allow you to feel on your fingertips the sensation of what you're doing virtually.
So, if you're grabbing a piece of equipment that's virtual, not in real life, but virtual, in this application, you actually feel that on your fingertips. You get the sense of grabbing and moving. And if you do that, imagine a hundred times in a virtual world, those steps become second nature.
And so, if we can take our trainees that are learning how to become either interventional cardiologists or learn what's done in interventional cardiology, this could be a revolutionary way of doing that. And we're pioneering that process here at Nationwide.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
It sounds a lot like flight simulator in terms of it's not just flying the plane. It's also removing the covers and taking the chocks off the wheels and, you know, starting the engine and taxiing and, you know, the whole thing from start to finish. I can see where that would be very useful for trainees.
And what other medical specialties might these technologies be useful for?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Well, you know, there have been other specialties that have taken this on and have created virtual reality and augmented reality applications for this. You know, notably, radiology is obviously a field where this becomes very helpful, and they've shown that this is very helpful. They're constantly looking at all these three-dimensional models, but in two-dimensional slices.
And being able to do that in an integrative way can be quite beneficial. And so, they've taken that on as a resource. The fields of orthopedics, neurosurgery, and others have really taken this as a potential benefit.
So, for instance, putting in joint replacements, understanding joint anatomy, understanding how to approach a neurosurgical problem. These are all things that have become part of the literature and what's been published in the field. And I know that there are several people here at our Children's Hospital that have latched on from a procedural side.
From the other side of things is sometimes the procedure is not always the important part. Sometimes it's all the things that go along with it. And so, we have experts here at Nationwide Children's that have taken on, Henry Zhang, who's taken on this concept of how to use virtual reality to alleviate pain and anxiety in our patients who are undergoing either an ID placement or burn care or whatever else it may be.
And he's shown very promising results in that. Workplace safety, so understanding how do you actually teach people how to respond to workplace safety events. And we've had great outcomes with some of the research in that as well.
So, Tan Sing Ma is a physician here at Nationwide Children's Hospital who is doing wonderful work in that field and sort of the concept of simulation within that type of event. And so, extended reality technologies have spanned a lot of cardiology, but it's spanned a lot of other subspecialties both within and outside of pediatrics as well.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And it seems like we're probably at the very beginning of the use of extended reality in healthcare. Where do you see the future being? Where are we heading?
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Yeah, well, I think that some of the work that we're doing here with haptic glove technology is a first step towards the future. I think what we need to do is be able to think to ourselves, what is the ideal version of what we have? And so the ideal version would be to use your hands and feel the things that are happening virtually and created virtually for you so that I can go into a procedure that I have tomorrow and do it all today virtually with my fingertips on that exact patient's anatomy with the exact equipment that I need, but be able to do that in a customized fashion.
And I think we have some work to do to get there. But if we can create a custom application or set of applications and allow the opportunity for the coding to involve using your fingertips and feeling the feedback that you need to feel so that when you're going into it, it's not practicing medicine, it's performing medicine, that would be the ideal world. And that's where it needs to head.
And then the second part of that is being able to integrate this into any part of what we do at a moment's notice. This is not a technology where you're going to use it in every single patient situation, but you're going to have set patient situations where it's extremely valuable and where we've found it to be valuable. And so, if we can have that integrated into any portion of what we do where someone is either in clinic or in an ICU or in an operating room or in a cath lab, at any moment, they can take that opportunity to say, this could be really useful.
Let's grab this just like we would grab any piece of equipment and use it right now on the spot to make this outcome better for our patients. If a learner is trying to learn something on a unit and needs something better than what we're doing, rounds are not enough necessarily to learn everything they need to learn, they can go grab a headset and dive into that problem and understand it better. And then we need to, again, produce research and publications that are proving that these things are useful or proving where they need to be better.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Such innovation coming out of the Heart Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital, and it really matches the innovation that we have in so many different divisions and departments throughout the hospital. Tell us a little bit more about the Heart Center at Nationwide Children's.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
It's a wonderful place, Mike. It's a collaborative group is the best way to describe it of many different experts. We pride ourselves in the concept of having everyone housed within a big umbrella of specialties.
And so, we have our CT cardiothoracic surgeons who are wonderful people to work with. We work with very closely our interventional cardiology group. We have advanced imagers, electrophysiologists, intensivists, anesthesiologists, cardiologists, both outpatient and inpatient.
And then not just physicians, but all the other advanced practitioners, nurses, child life specialists, social workers. This is a huge group that's here, and I'm missing some, I'm sure, nursing staff and others who are teaming up to provide the best outcomes for every single patient as an individual. And innovate the field and move it forward.
And we are constantly trying to work on improving ourselves and being very critical of ourselves because what our goal is, is to never be comfortable. Our goal is to always push ourselves to be better for the patients, be better for our trainees who are working hard to take care of those patients and support all the staff that is coming to work every single day with the primary outcome of doing better and moving the field forward. And so, this group here works closely.
They work very hard and long and tough hours, especially this recent holiday weekend. But we take great pride in what we do, and we love doing it. We love the work.
It's challenging work. Again, treating those fingerprints of every patient's heart lesions, but we love it.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Great. And we'll put a link to the Heart Center at Nationwide Children's in the show notes, along with, again, the article in Pediatrics Nationwide about the use of extended reality in congenital heart disease. And then also the virtual reality remote collaboration for pre-procedural planning of complex percutaneous congenital interventions.
That's the name of the journal article that we were mentioning previously, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Again, over at pediacast.org, episode 572. Well, Dr. Arash Salavitabar, Pediatric Interventional Cardiologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Thanks so much for stopping by today.
[Dr Arash Salavitabar]
Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time out of your day and making PediaCast a part of it. Really do appreciate that. Also, thanks again to our guests this week, Dr. Arash Salavitabar, Pediatric Interventional Cardiologist at Nationwide Children's. Don't forget, you can find us wherever podcasts are found. We're in Apple and Google podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Amazon Music, YouTube, and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android. Our landing site is pediacast.org.
You'll find our entire archive of past programs there, including show notes for each of those episodes, our terms of use agreement, and that handy contact page where you can let us know what you would like to hear about in future episodes. As I mentioned in the intro, we have a bit more capacity for episodes in 2025, so we need ideas. And if you have one, please head over to pediacast.org and use that contact page to let us know what you would like to hear about. Reviews are also helpful wherever you get your podcasts. We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show, and we love connecting with you on social media. You'll find us on Facebook, Instagram threads, LinkedIn, Twitter X, and perhaps Blue Sky coming up, so we'll see about that.
Simply search for PediaCast on any and all of those platforms and you'll find us, except Blue Sky, but we might be there soon. Don't forget, we have another podcast for pediatric providers called PediaCast CME. That stands for Continuing Medical Education.
It is similar to this program. We do turn the science up a couple notches and offer free continuing medical education credit for those who listen. That includes physicians, but also nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, and dentists.
And so, if you are any of those professions or you know someone in those professions, especially if they take care of kids, please let them know about PediaCast CME. And because Nationwide Children's is jointly accredited by all of those professional organizations, it's likely we offer the exact credit to you or whoever you know that needs them to fulfill your state's or their state's continuing medical education requirements. Shows and details are available at the landing site for that program, pediacastcme.org.
You can also listen wherever podcasts are found. Simply search for PediaCast CME. And I do want to announce something new that we have coming in 2025 through the Ohio State University College of Medicine, and that is another podcast called FAMEcast.
Now, FAME is our College of Medicine's Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement. And it's a center that really supports faculty where they are, both at home in their personal lives, you know, what kind of support, especially as we have new faculty members come who may not be familiar with the resources and things that are available in Central Ohio, really supports them throughout their career. So, in terms of promotion and tenure, and then also helps us all become better teachers as we develop curriculum, and we interact and engage with medical students and residents and fellows.
And really, we want to be the best medical teachers that we can be. And so, FAME is a center within the College of Medicine that really has a focus on developing the faculty of the college. And so much like PediaCast is here for parents, PediaCast CME is for medical providers who are practicing medicine and want to learn more about pediatric medicine on a professional level.
And then this third podcast that we're starting next year, FAMEcast is really going to deal with faculty development across all of medicine, not just pediatric specific, but really anywhere in medicine where we have teachers and faculty members, this is going to be for you. And you'll find that particular program at famecast.org. We haven't launched quite yet, but we are planning January 2025 will be our first episodes coming online.
So be sure to check that out. Again, I do want to wish everyone a happy holiday season. Please take time for your families, for your friends, for yourself.
A little bit of self-care is always important during the holidays. And I just really wish each and every one of you in the audience, we're just so thankful for all of you and wish you the best holiday season. Thanks again for stopping by.
We'll see you in 2025. And until then, this is Dr. Mike saying, stay safe, stay healthy, and stay involved with your kids. So long, everybody.
