HP Innovation Journal Issue 13: Winter 2019 | Page 52

COURTESY OF NICOLSON CENTER
The surgeon’s toolbox is expanding, with 3D printing, virtual reality, robots and artificial intelligence
poised to make procedures more efficient and improve patient outcomes.
The system distills down surgeries that can take an hour
or longer into 10-minute simulations. These help nurses
anticipate what a surgeon will need, and get them familiar
with the names and handling procedures for complex and
often dangerous instruments. It can also expose periopera-
tive nurses to rare operations like emergency neurosurgery,
which they may see only once or twice a year in real life.
AUGMENTED REALITY HELPS
SURGEONS SEE INSIDE
Where VR brings users into an immersive video game-
like 3D world through a wearable screen, AR is meant
to lay visual data over the real world when a user dons
transparent glasses.
SentiAR is building that capability for surgeons. Berk
Tas, the firm’s CEO and president, says AR is critical to
give doctors access to all of the information being gen-
erated by monitoring, imaging, and diagnostic systems
during operations.
“All of these systems sit alone in the OR creating data,”
Tas says. “Meanwhile, as humans, we have limitations to
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 13
the amount of data that we can make sense of all at once.
So we’re creating a connected environment, where data
is contextualized through holograms and delivered to the
surgeon at the time of need.”
Tas expects the FDA to clear SentiAR’s first offering by the
end of 2019. It will offer catheter lab clinicians a model of a
patient’s heart that floats before their eyes to help plan and
execute procedures faster and more accurately. They will
be able to navigate hands-free through this model based
on anatomical mapping.
“In the future, entire procedures will be digitized, and doc-
tors will be able to communicate with the instruments that
surround them through voice, gesture and gaze,” Tas says.
MADE-TO-ORDER INSTRUMENTS
Surgical procedures aren’t the only parts of the OR going
digital. Rapid advances in 3D printing—where layers of
metal or polymer materials are deposited on top of each
other to create complex designs—could soon change how
surgeons get tools into their hands.