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  5. Video games to save lives: Navigating the Body with Virtual Reality

Video games to save lives: Navigating the Body with Virtual Reality

Joeana is an international student from Mexico. She completed her undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 at Universidad Modelo in Mérida, Yucatán.
Joeana is an international student from Mexico. She completed her undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 at Universidad Modelo in Mérida, Yucatán.

By Joeana Cambranis Romero

Joeana Cambranis Romero is developing virtual reality tools to help surgeons navigate the body with greater precision and confidence.

Image of Joeana Cambranis Romero
Joeana is an international student from Mexico. She completed her undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 at Universidad Modelo in Mérida, Yucatán.
By Joeana Cambranis Romero

PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering

I develop “video games” to assist surgeries. Yes, you read it right. I’m a PhD student from Mexico, and I am part of an amazing research lab that develops special tools to help surgeons perform minimally invasive procedures to perform therapy without traditional surgery. In our lab, we use virtual and augmented reality technologies when developing these tools, like creating a video game to navigate inside the body! My work focuses on liver cancer. Currently, I am developing a navigation system that includes a virtual laser line to show the surgeons where a therapeutic needle will end up before it is inserted into the liver to treat the cancer. I use virtual reality, math and lots of engineering to achieve this! I hope my work can enhance surgeons' confidence when performing any kind of needle insertion, by helping them navigate around delicate body parts, reducing patient trauma in the process.

Joeana is an international student from Mexico. She completed her undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 at Universidad Modelo in Mérida, Yucatán. After graduation, Joeana worked for four years at Centro de Simulación Médica Montagne, Universidad Marista de Mérida. There, she discovered her passion for training future doctors by managing medical simulators and administering the center. This experience inspired her to improve training tools for medical students. To fulfill this dream, Joeana moved to Canada in 2020 to start her Master’s program in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on Robotics, where she joined a virtual and augmented reality lab. Since then, she has provided workshops for middle and high school students in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, aiming to introduce science through hands-on activities. Joeana completed her Master’s in 2022 and immediately started her PhD in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on Medical Imaging. She continues to organize science workshops, in conjunction with the develop of tools to aid and train surgeons, and the design "phantoms" for testing medical devices.

Joeana's research is highlighted in episode 488 of GradCast, the official podcast of the Society of Graduate Students at Western University.

You can connect with Joeana on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeana-cambranis-6789a78a/; on Instagram @joecambraromero; and via email jcambran@uwo.ca.

View Joeana's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection:  https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/582/.

Supervisor

Elvis Chen (https://www.eng.uwo.ca/electrical/faculty/chen_e/index.html)
Terry Peters (https://www.schulich.uwo.ca/biophysics/people/faculty/BIOS/terry_peters.html)