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Johns Hopkins' Department of Surgery has opened a training laboratory for today's surgeons to learn and perfect the minimally invasive techniques of tomorrow. The launched in 2002 with $3.5 million in funding from U.S. Surgical and equipment donations from Stryker Communications and Steris Corp. The Center offers specialists at Hopkins and elsewhere a place to practice minimally invasive surgeries on animate and inanimate models and mannequins. It also provides a venue for surgical and medical device companies to test new instruments.

Known as the Johns Hopkins/United States Surgical Minimally Invasive Surgical Training Center (MISTC), the facility features two laboratory training areas with a total of nine operating tables, a state-of-the-art conference room with seating for 35, locker rooms and office space. Robotic surgery may be performed in either suite. Faculty and trainers standing at the conference room's podium can view and discuss operations conducted in the next room. Telemedicine capabilities allow lectures and demonstration to be broadcast anywhere in the world and permit physicians to direct operations in distant locations.

The center provides "new training ground not only for surgeons but also for anesthesiologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists and all others interested in perfecting and learning advanced surgical techniques," said Paul W. Flint, M.D., center co-director and professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery. "It also will allow us to develop new technology to better care for our patients."

The center occupies renovated space most famously inhabited in the 1940s by the late Hopkins Surgeon-in-Chief Alfred Blalock. Blalock spent hundreds of hours there, rehearsing the operation that was the first to successfully repair the hearts of "blue babies," so named because their congenital heart defects left them blue from lack of oxygen.

Hopkins is one of a handful of medical centers in the country to host one of U.S. Surgical's "Training Centers of Excellence." To learn more about the MISTC, please contact Sue Eller at seller1@jhmi.edu.