Video game technology may help surgeons operate on beating hearts

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When surgeons patched holes guided by ordinary 3-D ultrasound they anchored their patches askew (left). Aided by stereoscopic vision (middle) they secured the patches with more evenly-spaced anchors (middle) results nearly as good as those with open- ...
When surgeons patched holes guided by ordinary 3-D ultrasound, they anchored their patches askew (left). Aided by stereoscopic vision (middle), they secured the patches with more evenly-spaced anchors (middle), results nearly as good as those with open-heart surgery (right). Credit: Images courtesy Nikolay Vasilyev, MD, Children’s Hospital Boston

Surgery has been done inside some adults' hearts while the heart is still beating, avoiding the need to open the chest, stop the heart and put patients on cardiopulmonary bypass. But to perform intricate beating-heart operations in babies with congenital heart disease or do beating-heart complex repairs in adults, surgeons need fast, highly sophisticated real-time imaging that allows them to see depth. In an NIH-funded study featured on the cover of the June Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, cardiac surgeons from Children's Hospital Boston report good results with a simple technology borrowed from the gaming industry: stereo glasses.


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