One of the people you’ll meet in SuperFreakonomics is a remarkable physician at Washington Hospital Center (WHC) named Craig Feied. He has had a hand in many technological innovations that are pushing medicine, hard, into the future (or at least the present).
Check out, for instance, the video below. It was taken in an operating room at WHC, using software developed by the Institutes for Innovation in Medicine and the Medical Media Lab. As you’ll see, the surgeon, who is preparing to take a brain biopsy, is able to manipulate the MRI images without touching a computer screen or controls. It is risky enough to perform brain surgery; the idea is to not add the risk of bacterial infection by having a gowned-and-gloved surgeon have to manipulate a bacteria-ridden computer mouse or screen. As we’ve written before, hospital bacteria are a serious problem. (Here‘s a paper on this innovation, co-authored by Feied.)
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I bet it would be cheaper to buy a cheap keyboard before surgery, sterilize it roughly (gamma/hot nitrogen/UV) and then throw it away after each surgery.
Seriously.
It might be cheaper now (using discardable keyboards and mice), but not in the long run. Ultimately technology like this becomes cheaper as the components do. Using technology like this is a great idea, and probably also has many carry-overs to the fields of disability adaptive assistance.
There is no such thing as anything cheap in the OR. Everything has to packaged, sterilized, tested, etc. You cannot buy any product, just sterilize it, and use it in the OR. An OR keyboard would cost $500, and be used only once. And would be incredibly easy to contaminate during use.
Yeh Michelle, you are so right about the economics, because the costly manned space missions ultimately produced a success like Tang. Remember, don’t get the data in the most cost-effective manner, the long way around the block is always best!
The BrainLab and similar imaging devices triangulate the location of a probe in real space and display it in the context of preoperative imaging.
In cases where these devices are not used, it’s common to cover a touchscreen with a sterile drape and use a sterile pointer to manipulate images. The latter is far less annoying than gesturing at a computer that probably takes an inordinate amount of effort to set up and is likely to misinterpret commands.
This is an interesting application of computer vision technology, but it doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking. Maybe I’m missing something but it looks like it just tracks obvious hand movements to flip through a few different screens.
I wrote some very simple face/object recognition software as an undergrad that could probably be adapted to do something similar (i.e. determine if the hand is moving left, right, up, down, etc. and act accordingly).
One of the research groups in our computer science department developed software allowing severely disabled people to move a pointer on the screen with head movements, and “click” by blinking their eyes. Another project was some software that could recognize subtle facial expressions or gestures. The only equipment needed was a $20 webcam.
I don’t think operating rooms are particularly price-sensitive. The MRI machine that generated those images likely cost upwards of $3 million, so using this system vs. a keyboard was not really an economic calculation.
I think the idea is that surgery, and medicine in general, is quickly heading toward a model that integrates the patients and surgeons themselves seamlessly with robotics, therapeutics, and massive amounts of data and information (which will soon include artificial intelligence),
I think that this new technology is really cool because it decreases the risk of the patients brains being contamanated