Apple’s Vision Pro is successfully helping nurses with spine surgeries – and more mixed reality medical work is on the way
In a fascinating technology adoption, a surgical team in Britain recently used Apple’s Vision Pro to assist with a medical procedure.
It wasn’t a surgeon who put on the headphones, but Suvi Verho, the head scrub nurse (aka theater nurse) at Cromwell Hospital in London. Scrub nurses assist surgeons by providing them with all the equipment and support they need to perform surgery – in this case it was spinal surgery.
said Verho The daily email that the Vision Pro used an app created by software developer eXeX to “float virtual screens over each other in front of (its display of) vital information.” The report adds that the mixed reality headset was used to help her prepare, keep track of the surgery and choose which tools to hand over to the surgeon. There is even a photo of the operation itself in the publication.
Sounding like a big fan of the Vision Pro, Verho says, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, “It eliminates human error… (and) guesswork.” Still, anything that makes operations run as smoothly as possible is okay in our books.
Syed Aftab, the surgeon who conducted the procedure, also had words of praise. He had never worked with Verho before. However, he said the headset turned an unknown scrub nurse “into someone with ten years of experience” working next to him.
Mixed reality support
As a company, eXeX is specialized in upgrading hospitals by implementing mixed reality. This isn’t the first time one of their products has been used in an operating room. Last month, American surgeon Dr. Robert Masson used the Vision Pro with the eXeX app to help him perform a spine procedure. Again, it doesn’t appear he was physically wearing the headset, although his assistants did. They used the device to follow procedural guidelines from a sterile environment, something previously considered ‘impossible’.
Dr. Masson had his own words of praise, stating that the combination of Vision Pro and the eXeX tool enabled a “distraction-free workflow” for his team. It is not known which software was used. However, when you view the company’s websiteit seems that both the team of Dr. Masson and nurse Verho used ExperienceX, a mixed reality app that gives technicians “a touch-free heads-up display”
Apple’s future in medicine
The future of the Vision Pro in medicine will not only apply to spine surgery. In a recent blog postApple highlighted several other medical apps that use visionOS Medical Corporation Stryker myMako to help doctors plan their patients’ joint replacement surgeries. It is for medical students Cinematic reality from Siemens Healthineers offers “interactive holograms of the human body”.
These two and more are available for download from the App Store, although some software requires a connection to the developer platform to work. You can download them if you want, but keep in mind that they are primarily intended for medical professionals.
If you’re looking for a headset with greater ease of use, check out Ny Breaking’s list of the best VR headsets for 2024.
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