Abstract
The role of simulation in surgical training has been implemented in a variety of specialties to improve surgical skills and the application of those skills prior to utilization in real-world practice. Neurological surgery has, in recent years, seen a substantial increase in available simulation platforms as well as the elegance with which these systems operate. The surgical rehearsal platform (SRP) was developed by Surgical Theater LLC (Mayfield, Ohio) to augment neurosurgical residency training in intracranial aneurysm clipping and allow practicing surgeons to “pre-live the future” by better anticipating the surgical environment and predict more accurately a proper configuration of clips to treat a particular patient. This advancement comes at a crucial time when endovascular technology for aneurysm treatment has seen its own exponential growth and improvement. The rehearsal platform renders patient-specific radiological data to recreate the intraoperative experience, and a recent study demonstrated favorable increases in operative efficiency following use of the SRP. Future endeavors to expand the technology to other neurosurgical interventions will include skull base meningioma resection, microvascular decompression, and transnasal pituitary tumor resection.