In a fascinating technology adoption, a UK surgical team recently used Apple's Vision Pro to assist with a medical procedure.
It wasn't a surgeon who put on the headset, but Suvi Verho, the senior scrub nurse (also known as an operating room nurse) at London's Cromwell Hospital. Scrub nurses assist surgeons by providing them with all the equipment and support they need to complete an operation (in this case, it was spine surgery).
Verho told The Daily Mail that Vision Pro used an app created by software developer eXeX to float “overlaid virtual screens in front of [her displaying] vital information.” The report adds that the mixed reality headset was used to help her prepare, track the surgery and choose which tools to hand to the surgeon. There is even a photo of the operation itself in the post.
Verho sounds like a big fan of the Vision Pro stating, perhaps a little hyperbolically, “It eliminates human error… [and] conjectures”. Still, anything that ensures operations run as smoothly as possible is fine in our books.
Syed Aftab, the surgeon who conducted the procedure, also had several words of praise. He had never worked with Verho before. However, he said the headphones turned an unknown instrumentalist “into someone with ten years of experience” working alongside him.
Mixed reality support
eXeX, as a company, specializes in improving hospitals through the implementation of mixed reality. This is not the first time that one of their products has been used in an operating room. Last month, American surgeon Dr. Robert Masson used Vision Pro with the eXeX app to help him perform a spine procedure. Again, it does not appear that he physically wore the headphones, although his assistants did. They used the device to follow procedural guides from within 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 unknown what software was used. However, if you check the company's website, it appears that both Dr. Masson's team and Nurse Verho used ExperienceX, a mixed reality app that gives technicians “a touchless touch screen.”
The future of Apple in medicine
The future of Vision Pro in medicine will not only be for spinal surgeries. In a recent blog post, Apple highlighted several other medical apps that take advantage of visionOS. Stryker Medical Corporation created myMako to help doctors plan their patients' joint replacement surgeries. 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 of the software requires a connection to the developer's platform to work. You can download them if you want, but keep in mind that they are primarily for medical professionals.
If you're looking for a headset with a wider range of usability, check out TechRadar's list of the best VR headsets for 2024.
