Michell Ruiz is a surgeon at Hospital Angeles Metropolitano, one of the most prestigious in Mexico City. He arrives at the venue and prepares to enter the operating room. An unprecedented accessory is added to the ritual of putting on the gown, hat and mask: the HoloLens mixed reality glasses.
You will use them to show the procedure to two surgeons located in France and Brazil. “Telecare is a reality,” says Ruiz in an interview for Digital Trends in Spanish.
What years ago would have involved traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to attend a medical demonstration is now being translated into a digital amphitheater through mixed reality technology. “The HoloLens allow us to interact with other surgeons at a distance, in a scenario that poses an advantage to remotely assist a doctor with less experience”, details the Mexican specialist in orthopedic surgery.
The use of mixed reality glasses is part of a Microsoft project to demonstrate the collaborative potential of its tools, in which some converge apps commonly used, such as the Microsoft Teams platform. Ruiz describes it as a qualitative leap in the field of surgery. “It’s like giving the brain extra eyes,” he details.
3D surgeries
When Microsoft introduced the HoloLens it showed rather playful applications, such as a world from the Minecraft video game that emerged on a table. Through these lenses, users see holograms superimposed on real objects. The combination of the real with the virtual was called mixed reality.
“The glasses project a three-dimensional hologram of the patient’s bone, the model is generated from a tomography and is projected onto the surgical field,” says Ruiz. It is, he explains, an unprecedented visual support in the field of surgery, since the hologram can be rotated or viewed in detail. Before innovation, visual aids refer to copies of an X-ray or, in the best of cases, a 2D image of a CT scan on a monitor.
“Surgeons are very visual, we work with what our eyes see. These holograms, which we can interpret in 3D, give us a better idea of what we are facing ”, he emphasizes.
Outside the operating room, Dr. Ruiz emphasizes that the HoloLens can become a novel tool for medical teaching. Equipped with a camera, they allow a person at a distance to see in real time what the surgeon is observing. In a practical setting, it would allow you to connect with an expert. “The learning curve is shorter, you look at it through an expert,” he concludes.
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