Fran Romano, a mechanical engineer at Neuralink, explains how the team builds 3D proxy models from CT and MRI scans that replicate patient anatomy so surgeons can practice implanting the device before operating on actual patients.
The surgeon comes up to me and goes, "I thought that was an actual person for a second." I've had surgeons tell us that it's the best proxy in the world. Nobody makes anything like it. Please, can you sell this to us? I'm Fran Romano. I'm a mechanical engineer on the surgery engineering team here at Neuralink. It's also fun to tell people that don't work here that I make fake people. We build physical 3D models that we call proxies that mimic a person's anatomy and get mechanical properties pretty close to what we want them to be. The Neuralink surgery doesn't exist. We couldn't copy something else, so we were developing the procedure itself. We We figured out how to take CT and MRI data and convert that into physical things that our neurosurgical staff could practice the procedure on.
