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Northeast Ohio group is urging state and federal agencies to improve, maintain infrastructure — P. 4 SPECIAL SECTION: Crain’s salutes some of the heroes in the local health care industry — Pages 13-21
Making the call for change Nonprofit pushes power of positive coaching CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Microsoft’s HoloLens technology has a lot of potential in medical education.
Docs don virtual reality headsets UH surgeons getting digital tour of patient’s brain By CHUCK SODER csoder@crain.com
Beyond the screen To create the system, a Mayfield Heights company called Surgical
Gary Massey has seen youth basketball coaches wrestle each other to the ground during a dispute. During his tenure as president of the Stallions Baseball Club, a Valley City-based youth organization, he’s seen coaches refuse to leave the field after getting ejected, and some who have no problem swearing in front of kids. Mark Shapiro also witnessed some troubling things when he started coaching his son’s baseball team, which led to plenty of online searches — and later the formation of the Cleveland chapter of Positive Coaching Alliance. The nonprofit, which launched in 1998 and will soon expand to 14 chapters nationally, holds workshops, and provides online courses, tips and tools for youth sports organizations, coaches and participants. The Cleveland chapter debuted two years ago, a few years after Shapiro, the president of the Cleveland Indians, reached out to Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson. “I can almost quote it verbatim: ‘I’ve been in pro sports my entire life, and my education the last year with my son’s baseball experience has not been positive,’ ” Thompson said of Shapiro’s initial email. When his schedule allows, Shapiro helps to coach his 12-year-old son Caden’s baseball team, along with his 10-year-old daughter Sierra’s basketball club. When Shapiro’s oldest first started playing sports, it was an eye-opening experience even for someone who grew up around the game as the son of prominent sports agent Ron Shapiro. “You look at sports your whole life, and then you have kids and you kind of get thrown into youth sports,” Shapiro said. “Some of what you see is good, and a lot of what you see is really upsetting. The biggest takeaway was how uneven the experience was.” When youth sports are “done right,” they have the potential to be “the greatest shaper of character and values,” the Tribe president said. “But when they’re executed with the wrong intentions,” Shapiro said, “which are usually driven by adults and not kids, what See COACHING, page 26
See HEADSETS, page 23
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It may not be long before local surgeons start wearing funky, futuristic headsets while operating on patients. Neurosurgeons at University Hospitals already are using a virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift to prepare for real procedures. And now they’re seeking UH’s approval to use it during operations, with patient consent. So if a surgeon was in the process of removing a brain tumor, he or she would be able to slide on the virtual reality headset and quickly tour a digital version of that patient’s brain. Another futuristic headset could upend how medicine education is delivered at both Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic: The two institutions, which plan to build a combined medical school campus at some point over the next few years, aim to create an anatomy curriculum that takes full advantage of Microsoft’s HoloLens. The device would allow medical
students to study life-size holograms of the body and its organs — and manipulate them by waving their hands. This is just the beginning, according to Dr. Warren Selman, chairman of the department of neurological surgery at UH Case Medical Center. He believes that the use of high-tech headsets in medicine is eventually going to become commonplace. “After a while, you won’t think twice about it,” he said. Today, neurosurgeons sometimes lose sleep the night before a big operation, as they try to visualize what they’ll see inside a patient’s brain. Using technologies like the Oculus Rift, however, they can walk around a tumor or an aneurysm and figure out exactly what they’ll need to do the following day, Selman said. “This really changes your ability to visualize,” he said.
By KEVIN KLEPS kkleps@crain.com
Entire contents © 2015 by Crain Communications Inc. Vol. 36, No. 20