The University General Universitary Hospital of Gregorio Marañón (Madrid) is the first center in the world to use virtual and augmented reality as a support tool for oncological surgery.
This hospital, together with its Biomedical Research Foundation and the Musculoskeletal Tumor Unit, last october successfully developed a mixed reality device capable of reducing the time and risks of a surgical operation.
Through the combination of virtual and augmented reality, surgeons can have all the patient’s information in a more visual way, being able to project it anywhere in the real world. In fact, they can access to TACs , resonances, x-rays and even to 3D reconstruction models of the patient’s tumor/s by either making gestures in the air or by voice commands. Furthermore, all these panels can be changed in space, hidden and explored from different angles. This device allows them to act with greater precision in the intervention.
The oncology surgery team has been evaluating these glasses in oncological surgeries since April 2017, being the first surgeons to apply them to a real surgery. Thanks to this new technology, it has been possible to reduce the duration of surgical operations and, along with it, the risk of bleeding and infection for the patient.
The glasses were designed by Microsoft and have been baptized with the name of HoloLens (Watch them in action here). They are wireless, have speakers, wifi, camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light, sight tracking and connection between devices. Furthermore, they contain a high performance microprocessor (equivalent to a computer’s brain) and 64 GB of memory. If you are asking yourself whether they are commercially available, the answer is yes. Everybody can have HoloLens for around 3,000$.
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