What is a 3D simulator, and what is it used for in medicine?

A 3D simulator is a software application that builds and displays three-dimensional environments virtually. Those environments can represent objects, places, physical phenomena, situations, or anything that can be modelled in three dimensions.

3D simulators have many applications in medicine. They reproduce the anatomy of healthy organs and the changes different diseases cause, step by step. They represent natural physiological processes and how a drug’s mechanism of action alters them. They simulate medical or surgical procedures virtually. They support work on diagnosis, comparing real tests and tools, such as ultrasound or MRI, against interactive 3D models that mirror them and make them easier to read. And they show how medical devices and equipment work, with every element open to interaction.

From all of that it follows how productive they can be for staff at pharmaceutical companies and for healthcare professionals and patients alike. They work as a visual, realistic and interactive training system that lets you understand what is represented without having it in front of you. A sales manager can master and demonstrate the workings of a complex product to their customers, portably and at lower cost, through an app. A clinician, or a medical or nursing resident, can feel more confident before acting, having trained and practised in a safe environment where the risk of certain interventions is removed. And it is a genuinely useful tool in clinical practice, helping professionals explain to a patient their condition, their surgery, their needs and complications, or how to handle an injectable device.

Real examples: 3D simulators already in service

3D uterus viewer with a pathology simulator: built for a pharmaceutical company, it launched in Spain and the client chose to extend it to 7 countries. It has passed 2,000 downloads worldwide.

Sanitas Dental 3D viewer: shows oral conditions and treatments to patients through augmented reality. After a pilot in two hospitals it was rolled out to every Sanitas Dental centre in Spain and the United Kingdom, and won the 2019 Aspid Award in the Augmented and Virtual Reality category.

You can see these and other projects on our page for 3D simulators for medical training, and how we combine them with medical animation and 3D video to explain mechanisms of action.

At Inneva Pharma we have been building these tools for more than 13 years, with a team of 3D designers, developers and scientific advisers able to hold a real conversation with anatomy experts and with national and international opinion leaders. That is what lets us produce models that are complete, realistic and genuinely useful, together with our clients. All anatomical content is certified by anatomy specialists (UAB) and uses international anatomical nomenclature.

Would you like to see a 3D simulator working? Tell us what you need to explain or to train, and we will show you a demo: get in touch.