Practice is the single most important determinant of a surgeon’s skills. In an effort to significantly improve the trajectory of surgical training, virtual reality (VR) based systems (so-called “surgical simulators”) are being developed to select, train, credential, and retrain physicians, much like flight simulators are used today to train aviation pilots with great success. Such systems, equipped with visual as well as haptic (touch) interfaces, provide an immersive “virtual environment” that enables the trainee to touch, feel, and manipulate virtual tissues and organs through surgical tool handles used in actual surgery, while seeing high-quality images as in real surgery. In this talk we will present some of our recent work in the development and clinical validation of virual surgical systems.