Video Game Technology helps surgeons operate on beating hearts – Cardiac Surgeons see better with Stereoscope Glasses

3D ultrasound guidance - clinical trials could begin with children with ASD this year. Trials had been used with 3D imaging techniques, but there was a lack of depth, however with the gamers glasses the heart ultrasound images can be seen as a hologram. One physician stated you actually feel like you in inside the heart. The work was supported in part by the NIH. With children’s hearts being smaller, this could be a big step forward in being able to perform beating heart surgery when needed. Was that Cardio surgeon in surgery or just catching up on his X-Box game? By the way, several hospitals have also installed X-Box for the pediatric wards, helps pass the time for children while laid up in the hospital. BD

BOSTON, June 9 (AScribe Newswire) -- Surgery has been done inside some adults' hearts while the heart is still beating, avoiding the need to open the chest, stop the heart and put patients on cardiopulmonary bypass. But to perform intricate beating-heart operations in babies with congenital heart disease or do beating-heart complex repairs in adults, surgeons need fast, highly sophisticated real-time imaging that allows them to see depth. In an NIH-funded study featured on the cover of the June Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, cardiac surgeons from Children's Hospital Boston report good results with a simple technology borrowed from the gaming industry: stereo glasses.

The researchers, led by Pedro del Nido, MD, and Nikolay Vasilyev, MD, of Children's department of cardiac surgery, had already been testing a three-dimensional ultrasound imaging system. But although the images are 3D and displayed in real time, they give little indication of depth. In animal tests, surgeons trying to navigate surgical tools inside the heart became disoriented when guided by these images. Del Nido, chief of Cardiac Surgery at Children's, realized that what they needed was stereoscopic vision. Watching the flat picture on the computer screen was like watching a baseball game on TV, he says. "It's good enough to follow what's happening in the game, but you could never grab a ball in mid-flight," del Nido explains. So collaborator Robert Howe, PhD, of Harvard University, plucked a solution from video games - splitting computer images in two and cocking them at slightly different angles. When wearing gamers' flickering glasses, users can see ultrasound images of the beating heart as a hologram. "You definitely have depth perception," says Vasilyev. "You feel like you're inside the heart chamber.