An Israeli biomedical technology firm engineered this awesome new piece of equipment. After successful clinical trials held by Israel’s Schneider Children's Medical Center, physicians can now use three dimensional hologram technology to better understand how a patient’s heart beats to help guide the outcomes of various heart surgeries, EuroNews reported. As a result of high tech light scattering technology, the hologram of the heart is seen “floating” mid-air during the surgical procedure.
“What that does is that gives you the patient’s anatomy, the real patient’s anatomy in a position where it’s hyper realistic, you can see all of it, you can intuitively know where you are or what’s going on inside that anatomy in real time. So you can use that to guide procedures, you can use that to understand better the anatomy that you want to deal with,” stated Dr. Elchanan Bruckheimer, physician and Medical Director at Realview, the company involved in first producing the novel technology.
"Doctors deal with patients. Patients are built of tissues and things that move,” Dr. Bruckheimer elaborated. “If we want to intervene and treat those things, looking at them as they actually are in real life, in real time, is definitely going to improve the way we perform our procedures, how successful we are in those procedures and the time it takes to do those procedures. When I don't have to build it in my head from a couple of flat images, but I have the whole volume, then intuitively I can interact with the patient's anatomy. So I think the impact on clinical medicine in the wide diagnostic communication, understanding and intervening, that's where it's gonna be, you have the true patient's anatomy, and if it's a heart, beating in the palm of your hand.”
“The holographic projections enabled me to intuitively understand and interrogate the 3D spatial anatomy of the patient’s heart, as well as to navigate and appreciate the device-tissue interaction during the procedure,” commented Dr. Einat Bir who works as a pediatric cardiologist and serves as Director of the Institute of Pediatric Cardiology at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Israel.
This unique hologram technology has also been used similarly to that of an ultrasound to examine fetuses during pregnancy.
Written by Erin Parfet
