An operating room in the Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich. “One millimeter, 14 degrees – shows green, shows: Go!” says Mazda Farshad in a broad Swiss dialect and places a whirring drill on the spine of the patient who is lying on the operating table in front of him. The bones were exposed through a hand-length incision. The angle and drill depth are displayed to Farshad via AR glasses, which sit like a huge compound eye between the green surgical cap and face mask. “Feedback from the surgeon: Very good!” he comments. “Now the screw can be inserted.”
The aim is to stiffen two vertebrae on top of each other, with two screws per vertebra and two rods parallel to the spine. The perfect bar shape is calculated by the glasses software and translated into a bright blue hologram. The surgeons bend a titanium rod, compare it again and again with the hologram until everything fits, and finally implant it. The AR glasses can also show Farshad a 3D simulation of the patient’s bones, veins and tissue. “It seems like an additional sense,” he says. Previously, during operations, he had to repeatedly look back and forth between the patient and the monitors in order to compare his own actions with images from computer or magnetic resonance tomographs.
This holographically navigated and videotaped spinal surgery took place on December 11, 2020. It is one of the first of its kind in the world. Since then, reports of success have been increasing. With virtual help, knees, brains and eyes have already been operated on and the heads of Siamese twins have been separated. And while university hospitals like Zurich often work with their own developments, companies like Medivis, Arthrex and Medacta are already making money with AR glasses for surgery.