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MediView XR90 will allow Carle Illinois College of Medicine students to use an augmented-reality tool that overlays holograms of internal scans onto a patient’s body.
MediView XR90 will allow Carle Illinois College of Medicine students to use "x-ray vision" by overlaying holograms of internal scans onto a patient's body.
MediView XR90 will allow Carle Illinois College of Medicine students to use an augmented-reality tool that overlays holograms of internal scans onto a patient’s body.
MediView XR90 will allow Carle Illinois College of Medicine students to use "x-ray vision" by overlaying holograms of internal scans onto a patient's body.
URBANA — New technology will give Carle Illinois medical students “X-ray vision,” providing them with an augmented view of patients’ bones and tissues during operations.
The Carle Illinois College of Medicine is the first school in the world to use the MediView XR90 platform, which received FDA clearance earlier this year for use with patients.
“What that allows us to do is to really work with them to understand it better, to really enhance the capabilities of it through improved engineering and some new use cases that can really expand this type of technology to a larger set of patients and diseases, but also to train the future of health care, which is physicians, nurses, health care providers, to be able to utilize these technologies effectively,” said Mark Cohen, dean of CI MED.
The technology itself may be complicated, but its use is easier to understand: It’s a live feed of a CT scan or an ultrasound, similar to what many mothers see when they get an ultrasound done during pregnancy.
But instead of being displayed on a screen, it’s shown as a three-dimensional object displayed in augmented-reality goggles worn by the students. AR goggles are like normal eyewear but with an additional video overlay transmitted on the lenses.
They’re unlike virtual-reality goggles, like the ones people use to play video games, which completely block out the wearer’s vision of the real world.
“The proceduralist can see all the anatomy, see all the areas they need to go to if they’re going to put a needle in a tumor, let’s say, or get a biopsy of something,” Cohen said.
Usually, a health care professional doing a procedure like that would need to look at a screen while operating on a person’s body.
That means looking back and forth, having to work very carefully to understand how the livestream and their movements match up. And if they want a different view of the area they’re working on, they have to interact with the screen to obtain it.
MediView XR90 eliminates a lot of those challenges by joining the video feed and what the proceduralist can see with their own eyes.
“This is a way to teach procedural skills to students and to think about how to integrate imaging into a simulation in a way that allows them to understand the anatomy better and to understand how to use procedural equipment better,” Cohen said.
This is the first augmented-reality technology to be approved by the FDA for clinical use.
It’s pretty limited, for now, and can only be used for minorly invasive CT- or ultrasound- guided procedures, as well as pre-surgery planning.
Cohen foresees use cases expanding as students and health care professionals begin to use the technology in the real world and think of other ways it could be helpful.
He said that this will benefit students at the University of Illinois outside of the College of Medicine, too, like engineering and applied health sciences students who are interested in innovation.
“As we think about developing where mixed-reality technologies can really be applied to innovate in health care, this is going to be one advancement that’s really going to stimulate a lot of others to come in the future,” Cohen said.
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