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Microsoft is partnering with Stryker to help redesign operating rooms:
For as much as many are focused on the gaming and consumer-level productivity potentialities of XR, much of the progress in the field is happening in other markets, like industry and medicine. To wit, Microsoft announced that it's partnering with a medical technology company called Stryker to use HoloLens to design better operating rooms.
In a blog post, Microsoft explained that, "Everything from lighting, to equipment, tools, and even patient orientation, varies depending on who is using the operating room at any given moment. Equipment placement is critical as it effects [sic] ergonomics, efficiency, and task load, all of which have the potential to burden staff and slow procedures." To design better operating rooms, the company said, heads of multiple surgical disciplines need to physically meet to solve these issues, and a 3D design environment can help them do so much more efficiently.
From the blog post:
You may not be aware of it, but surgical disciplines from general, to urologic, orthopedic, cardiac, and ear nose and throat (ENT) use shared operating rooms. These specialties have widely different needs when it comes to operating room configuration and setup. Everything from lighting, to equipment, tools, and even patient orientation, varies depending on who is using the operating room at any given moment. Equipment placement is critical as it effects ergonomics, efficiency, and task load, all of which have the potential to burden staff and slow procedures.
Today, for hospitals to successfully design operating rooms that will accommodate these various medical disciplines, a critical meeting must take place. In this meeting, the heads of each surgical discipline, along with their staff, are physically present to outline the desired layout and implementation needed to successfully complete their procedures. This is a complicated and time-consuming process where people and a complex array of technology and equipment are shuffled around to determine what goes where, and when, to see how it will all fit.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:15AM
You may not be aware of it, but surgical disciplines from general, to urologic, orthopedic, cardiac, and ear nose and throat (ENT) use shared operating rooms.
Operating rooms are expensive. Between the expensive equipment, the whole cleanliness thing, and the inability to use them for, I dunno, break rooms, they're expensive single taskers. I can see how doing minor re-configs between surgeries might be useful, but you'll never see a dedicated urologic, cardiac, whatever operating room.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @11:45PM
Operating rooms are expensive. Between the expensive equipment, the whole cleanliness thing, and the inability to use them for, I dunno, break rooms, they're expensive single taskers. I can see how doing minor re-configs between surgeries might be useful, but you'll never see a dedicated urologic, cardiac, whatever operating room.
Um. Well, first, let's talk about Cardiac Cath labs. Many hospitals have them. What do they do? Well, they insert catheter lines into people (usually the femoral artery,) and run that cath up into the cardiac arteries where they can image, angioplasty, or place shunts. They don't do anything else in those procedure rooms. Those are surgeries, by the way, and the room is kept sterile. They would be conducted in a special form of..... ?
Second, let's look at pain centers. A pain center may have a room for doing injection procedures. They utilize x-ray fluoroscopy to guide an inserted needle into a specific point of the body where an analgesic can be delivered. Did you know that injection procedures are coded as surgeries, because one is invading the body to achieve a therapeutic purpose? And those rooms do nothing else but those types of injective surgery, and should be kept very sterile. They are thus conducted in a special form of.... ?
Third, let's just note that if a hospital has, say, a heart or heart-lung center, is loaded with cardiology, pulmonology, and cardithoracic surgeons... they might very well dedicate an operating theatre to nothing but cardiac procedures. (Barring some disaster or multiple traumas which outstrip the hospital's nominal OR capacity.... but in that case you could press any other room in the house as an emergency operating suite, too - starting with ER rooms - so not much distinction there.)
Fourth, there are all sorts of other specialized operating theatres. We have a cancer center in town that has stereotactic radiosurgery. (Use radiation in a very focused manner to eliminate tumors in the brain without cutting.) Those are operating rooms, even though the patient is never invaded (well, they do surgically attach fiducials or frames.) And I guarantee that they do nothing in those rooms but SR procedures.
Finally, I could be very much wrong about this one, but if I'm not mistaken the hospital facilities of Cancer Treatment Centers of America includes operating theatres. They may deal with all areas of the body, but those are very definitely specialized oncology ORs.
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