Surgeons and engineers at Duke University are currently testing Microsoft’s HoloLens headset to find new ways to assist surgery teams during operations (via Inc.com). Their goal is to expand surgeons’ field of view by using medical data to project holograms onto patients, allowing for safer operations especially during emergency situations.
For now, Duke surgeons are experimenting with the HoloLens for a procedure called ventriculostomy, involving drilling a hole through a patient’s skull to place a catheter in the brain. Andrew Cutler, neurosurgery resident at Duke explained that “we’ll be able to guide the catheter in under navigation, instead of basically doing it blind. We can see the brain how it actually appears, right in front of us in three dimensions.”
You can see a video of the simulation below, be aware that it’s still a work in progress:
As of today, the team at Duke University has only tested the mixed-reality headset with models. However Cutler aims to test it on a cadaver by spring 2017 and ultimately on people after getting approval from Institutional Research Board.
