A recent paper authored by Dr. Bobby Korn at the University of California, San Diego made some intriguing conclusions from 16 operations completed with physicians wearing Apple Vision Pro to view cameras inside the human body. Here are the listed highlights from the paper, bolding added: * Spatial computing improves ergonomic comfort in endoscopic surgery. * Apple Vision Pro enables immersive, hands-free surgical visualization. * Operative time shortened without increased cognitive workload. * Low cost and small footprint make spatial computing feasible for operating room integration. The paper suggests that, on average, operations could be performed over eight minutes faster because the doctors didn’t keep turning their heads to look at a physical monitor showing the live view from a camera inside the body. “When you’re actually looking at a monitor, you’re actually oftentimes using one monitor that is shared by everyone in the entire room,” Dr. Korn said on the Good VR Podcast. “So it’s not naturally the most ergonomic thing that you’re using. So you’re turning your head, you’re turning your hips, and you’re doing this hundreds of times throughout the case. And that creates a significant amount of fatigue for the surgeon themselves. What ends up happening is that when I’m doing work in the nose, taking instruments in and out, I’m actually doing this hundreds of times during the case. And as I look down and I look up, my eyes are constantly looking for the image on the screen. With the Vision Pro, the image is always in front of us. We always see it.” From the paper’s conclusion: “…contemporary operating room costs approximate $51 per minute. Applying the observed 8.3 min reduction yields an estimated saving of roughly $420 per case, and for a practice performing 100 to 200 endoscopic DCR procedures annually this would correspond to an estimated $42,000 to $85,000 per year.” I encourage you to pair this conversation with my earlier talk with Jamie Lockwood at HMDmd for an overview of the types of procedures that might feature paired cameras providing 3D stereoscopic imagery to doctors looking inside the body. In some situations, doctors might also want an open periphery from their head-mounted display to occasionally look down at their hands directly. Overall, the two conversations paint a picture of the research frontier at the very cutting edge of medical technology. While the scale of the study is small, if its takeaways can be replicated elsewhere, there might be profound implications for healthcare savings provided by VR headsets. “The things that really drew me to Apple’s device was that the resolution is just so high and so crisp,” Dr. Korn said. “The refresh rate is good. But in addition to that, though, is the pass through. So you mentioned that other system where you actually place it over your eye and you’re able to look in the periphery. Every time you do that, your eye has to undergo a process called accommodation where you actually change the shape of your eye…And that just adds to the fatigue and exhaustion to a surgeon if they’re, say, doing an operation for several hours at a time….You want a surgeon who’s comfortable, who can see exceedingly well with the images presented into them, really to give you the best outcome.” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe
