Could Apple Vision Pro Really be MedTech?

The surgical team at Cromwell Hospital added the Apple Vision Pro to its medical technology equipment, as it assisted in two spinal surgeries.

• A scrub nurse used the headset for preoperative preparations and intraoperative guidance.
• The software developed by eXeX facilitated the seamless projection of virtual screens, enabling tool selection and progress monitoring in real time.

Cromwell Hospital in London integrated the Apple Vision Pro into two surgical procedures.

During two recent spinal surgeries, a medical team at Cromwell Hospital incorporated the $3,500 headset into their operative toolkit. The surgeons themselves did not wear the device, but a scrub nurse did. They leveraged its capabilities for preoperative preparations and intraoperative guidance.

eXeX developed the software that the team used. It projected virtual screens onto the operating room environment, which allowed the surgical team to select tools and monitor progress seamlessly.

This is one of the first demonstrations of how the Apple Vision Pro is more than a spatial computing device for your Excel sheets and viewing pleasures.

Talking to the Daily Mail, lead scrub nurse Suvi Verho, who wore the Vision Pro during the surgeries, believes that “it eliminates human error. It eliminates the guesswork. It gives you confidence in surgery.”

Dr. Syed Aftab, one of the surgeons involved, praised the device’s ability to enhance surgical precision. “The software is seamless and has improved efficiency within the Complex Spine team,” he said in a press release.

Who would have thought that a spatial computing headset would be this useful? How would you feel if, right before the anesthesia knocks you out, you saw a nurse strap a device, which is as expensive as the operation itself, to her head?

A person would need to get used to this eventually. Regardless, if it guarantees a higher rate of success, do we really have a right to complain?

According to a 2019 study published in The Lancet, Global burden of postoperative death, 4.2 million people are estimated to die worldwide within 30 days of surgery annually. Some of these deaths are most probably due to human error. Have you ever heard of how some doctors leave equipment in their patients’ bodies? Or miss something crucial? Humans make mistakes. We can’t always fault them for that. But maybe, perhaps with how we are advancing technologically, we can reduce the numbers.

But what happens when we become too dependent on such technologies? Should professionals be allowed to integrate the newest and shiniest gadgets haphazardly? Some of them hold others’ lives in their hands. Is it the smartest thing in the world to allow them to cut corners?

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