Easing Collaboration for Remote Surgery with HoloLens 2

Mount Sinai Health System, in partnership with SphereGen and Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 equipped with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist (RA), have taken another step-in realizing Mt. Sinai’s mission – to provide global surgical health to places around the world that are underserved. Since this project began in August 2020, Remote Surgery with HoloLens 2 technology has been utilized to diagnose over 3000 patients and successfully treat over 400 at the Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Uganda.

Remote Surgery with Mount Sinai

The Mount Sinai project needed to solve the difficult problem of transporting doctors to remote areas of need, efficiently and at scale. Today, most medical institutions that want to impact remote geographical regions must physically send their doctors and specialists to that location. This process, especially when compounded by Covid-19 restrictions, is costly, inefficient, and often leads to missed opportunity – as patients are not always present when the doctors are. As Dr. Marin says, these problems are, “unlikely to be solved by exporting or importing surgeons into regions of need but finding more efficient ways of using tech to share knowledge”.

The Remote Surgery Solution

Utilizing the HoloLens 2, Mount Sinai doctors and specialists were able to directly interact with surgeons at the Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Uganda, over 7000 miles away. Unlike other real time video conferencing, when using the HoloLens 2, you’re hands free and untethered to a computer. Surgeons wearing the HoloLens 2 can see and respond in real time to any information the Doctor on Remote Assist provides, whether that be visual, audio, or written. Dr. Marin, after using the HoloLens 2 technology, believes that, “up to 60-75% of surgery done throughout the world can be done like this”.

What is Dynamics 365 Remote Assist?

Remote Assist is a powerful tool for both smart phones and HoloLens 2 that allows employees to interface with industry experts at a moment’s notice. Regardless of the business problem, Remote Assist on the HoloLens 2 will reduce the problems perceived complexity by combining video, audio and written instruction into a seamless educational package for your employee. For instance, in the Mount Sinai video, we see that a simple surgical procedure in the US can be completely foreign to doctors in Uganda. Utilizing Remote Assist and its interactive overlay technology, Dr. Marin was able to communicate the best method of incising a growth on the patient without any sort of miscommunication occurring.

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”auto” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]For a more detailed explanation of Remote Assist, click here[/dropshadowbox]

The Future of Mount Sinai and HoloLens 2

Though the partnership with Mount Sinai and SphereGen has only just begun, the doctors involved are already thinking of other use cases for the HoloLens 2 technology within their industry and organization. When asked about how he sees this technologies progression, Dr. Marin said, “I readily see how we will begin to integrate this into our residency and surgical training programs in this institution. We can begin to advance independent surgical skills with our trainees on a more rapid basis. This will form a very important part of the education of the next generation of surgeons”

The HoloLens 2 technology is an innovation that will lead to an increase in both the quality and frequency of global collaboration and problem solving. There are already some exciting examples of how this technology is being put into action, but the true reach of its potential has yet to be seen. As Dr. Marin so adeptly says, “The ability to do something that can be scaled much farther beyond an individual’s technical skills and take it from 1 person to 1000 is one of the most exciting things I’ve experienced in my professional life”