Holographic Surgical Simulation – With NO Headgear!

San Diego, California-based Xenco Medical has put a new product on “the red carpet” with the release of HoloMedX, the first glasses-free holographic surgical simulation platform on the market. With HoloMedX, surgeons can simulate an entire spine surgery in holographic space—no need for headgear or glasses.

HoloMedX, says Xenco, is integrated with a “Looking Glass” light field display, and translates DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) data such as CT and MRI images into a detailed, interactive holographic reconstruction. The platform allows for viewing and interactivity by multiple users, simultaneously.

Founder and CEO Jason Haider told OTW, “There’s been a growing convergence of digital technologies and surgery over the past several years. Though that’s been an exciting development, the outcomes of those efforts had yet to realize the promise of seamless, holographic surgical simulation due to the barrier of headgear and the lack of patient specificity. This was most apparent to us when a number of our surgeon users noted that patient education can be fraught with obstacles, especially for complex cases, and a number of our surgeon users at teaching institutions expressed a desire to find novel technologies through which they could present surgical cases during grand rounds.”

“As a deeply patient-centric spinal device company, we’ve made a commitment to addressing the entire spectrum of a patient’s surgical experience. In keeping with this commitment, we set our sights on addressing the challenges that were expressed to us by surgeons across the country. We chose to take an interdisciplinary approach to tackling those challenges by developing a robust holographic simulation platform that leverages advancements in light field display technology, allows for patient-specific holographic reconstruction, and enables real-time placement of a range of holographic implants based on Xenco Medical’s actual spinal implants using air controllers modelled after our spinal instruments.”

HoloMedX comes with a library of holographic implants based on Xenco Medical’s actual spinal implants. Surgeons can manipulate the holographic anatomy and implants with air controllers modeled after Xenco Medical’s disposable surgical instruments.

When OTW asked for insight into the development process, Haider stated, “There were two particularly exciting moments during the development process. The first was the moment we were successful in our efforts to optimize the computing time required by our ray casting algorithm so that our software could not only instantly translate a two-dimensional DICOM data set into a volumetric reconstruction but render it into an interactive hologram at the same time. The second particularly exciting moment was successfully integrating our air controllers into our HoloMedX platform, which are modelled after our disposable instruments, and using them to place holographic implants into the reconstructed anatomy.”

“Through HoloMedX, surgeons not only have a tool to deeply engage with their patients by interacting with patient-specific anatomy in holographic space, without the barrier of headgear, but now have the opportunity to simulate previous surgeries for large groups of trainees in holographic space, allowing a hyper-realistic view of each surgical decision using holographic implants, whether at a conference or during grand rounds.”