In the Kinect Effect advert one scene shows doctors using Kinect during surgery to view computer based scans of a patient. There have been a number of examples of this in action and most recently, surgeons at St Thomas’ hospital in London have begun trialing such as system during vascular surgery procedures.
It may sound like science fiction but it’s very real and the BBC had an extensive report on this project last week, as did New Scientist a week earlier. Surgeons can use gestures to pan and zoom around images such as CT scans and I believe this is the first implementation that makes use of Kinect’s sophisticated microphone array to allow voice control.
The system was developed in partnership with researchers from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and Kings College in London and I got to play with it first hand back in March, albeit not during surgery. As seen in the video above, a series of gestures enables manipulation of 3D vascular renderings.
it’s encouraging to hear these remarks from John Brennan, president of the British Society for Endovascular Therapy, in the BBC story.
“I think these sort of advances in image manipulation which is an integral part of the a lot of the minimally invasive stuff that is done nowadays – they are inevitably going to become more refined and more available.
“I would find it difficult to think of operating rooms in ten or 15 years time where these were just not the norm.”
