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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google Glass came back from the dead to assist cardiologists completing a difficult surgery [kurzweilai.net]:

Cardiologists from the Institute of Cardiology, Warsaw, Poland have used Google Glass in a challenging surgical procedure, successfully clearing a blockage in the right coronary artery of a 49-year-old male patient and restoring blood flow, reports the Canadian Journal of Cardiology [onlinecjc.ca].

Chronic total occlusion, a complete blockage of the coronary artery, sometimes referred to as the "final frontier in interventional cardiology," represents a major challenge for catheter-based percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), according to the cardiologists.

[...] Coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) is increasingly used to provide physicians with guidance when performing PCI for this procedure. The 3-D CTA data can be projected on monitors, but this technique is expensive and technically difficult, the cardiologists say.

So a team of physicists from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling of the University of Warsaw [uw.edu.pl] developed a way to use Google Glass to clearly visualize the distal coronary vessel and verify the direction of the guide-wire advancement relative to the course of the blocked vessel segment.

The procedure was completed successfully, including implantation of two drug-eluting stents.

First-in-Man Computed Tomography-Guided Percutaneous Revascularization of Coronary Chronic Total Occlusion Using a Wearable Computer: Proof of Concept [onlinecjc.ca] [abstract]

Original Submission