In August 2018, Jonathan and Na’ama Ellman, an Israeli couple living in the United States, brought their two-year-old son Ari to the emergency room for uncontrolled vomiting. Their whole world seemed to shatter when the doctors realized that the problem was caused by a large tumor in the lower part of his brain. A complex procedure known as transnasal endoscopic skull base surgery, essentially aiming to remove the tumor through the nose, had successfully treated similar cases in the past, but had never been performed on such a young child, which presented a whole set of additional challenges.
A team at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Stanford, California, agreed to perform the operation and Israeli technology came to help: the surgeons had the opportunity to train on a virtual reality platform simulating the surgery, much like fighter pilots would do before a perilous mission, thanks to Surgical Theater, an Israeli start-up established by former Israeli Air Force officers.
