Dr Stephen Quinn, a gynaecologist at hospitals in the NHS Trust Imperial College, appears on TV show to help a patient, Hilda, with a condition causing her swollen abdomen. After taking careful scans of Hilda’s body, the team are able to show her the growths, called fibroids, that are behind her pain.

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“I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at MRI scans of pelvises, and having these images is extremely helpful in clinic,” said Quinn. “But using augmented reality just took that to a whole different level. It was fantastic being able to to fully visualise exactly what was going on in the pelvis ahead of the surgery to remove the fibroids.”

Unfortunately, the technology is a way off being available on the NHS, but Quinn said AR’s use could be commonplace within the next decade.

For the show, radiologists at Imperial hospitals provided artists with in-depth scans of each patient. Dr Dimitri Amiras, a musculoskeletal consultant radiologist at Imperial, also worked on the experiment.

First, patients would undergo routine scans. “In order to define what the organ is and where the pathology is, that’s all done by radiologists. We are the ones to identify it and look at the imaging techniques work out what is good tissue, what’s bad tissue,” said Amiras. “Then, once we’ve got those images with relevant bits identified, digital artists may draw around them or even use artificial intelligence to make all the pretty pictures and the shiny stuff.”

Once finished, the patients and doctors would wear an AR device to ‘see’ the body part in front of them. Each was 3D, and could be zoomed in or out, rotated, and compared to the same areas on a healthy individual.

Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/

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