“When my boss, Joachim Herrmann, told me that I had to cover liver surgery using an iPad, I had no idea how an iPad could be helpful during an operation,” Fabian Bimmer reports for Reuters. “I knew that iPhones, iPads and tablets were becoming more important in being useful in all sorts of activities in our daily life – but for surgeries?”
“To get a feel for the atmosphere, the hospital, light conditions and the team, I went to meet Professor Karl Oldhafer, chief physician of general and visceral surgery at the Asklepios Clinique in Hamburg-Barmbek, two days before I had to go through with my project,” Bimmer reports. “After two more nights I woke early, had my usual pot of coffee and arrived pretty much on time at the Barmbek hospital to join Professor Oldhafer’s team in the changing room.”
Bimmer reports, “Then the Professor entered the room with an iPad in his hands… When he could see the liver he used the iPad to localize the two tumors in the liver… [via] augmented reality, which allows the liver to be filmed with an iPad and overlaid during an operation with virtual 3D models reconstructed from the real organ. Developed by Fraunhofer MEVIS in Bremen, this procedure helps locate critical structures such as tumors and vessels and is expected to improve the quality of transferring pre-operational resection plans into actual surgery, according to Bianka Hofmann from the institute.”
Read more, and see photographs of the surgery (WARNING: Not for the squeamish), in the full article here.
[Attribution: International Business Times. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BlackWolf” for the heads up.]
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