The lung surgeons at Erasmus MC speak of a major step forward. “An absolute revolution in diagnostics”, says heart-lung surgeon Lex Maat. “Previously, we had to reconstruct the course of the blood vessels slice by slice in our head to get a bit of an idea of how it is three-dimensional. With the VR glasses I can walk through the lung, as it were, see exactly where the tumor is located I can now go straight for the target and isolate and remove only the diseased tissue ”.
The result is that the patient is left with much more healthy lung tissue and breathing capacity. Another advantage is that operations are faster, which benefits the recovery of the patients.
Save healthy tissue
The method is especially useful in finding and removing very small tumors, for example in early stage lung cancer. Usually such a tumor is hidden in the lung, which makes it difficult for the surgeon to see or feel it. In that case, a large lobe was often removed from the lung, but it could also happen that the surgeon was wrong because he could not see it properly.
Surgeon in training Amir Sadeghi (30): “We can now look more accurately and with more self-confidence for exactly that piece of lung that we want to take out and avoid damaging the parts of the lung that are still healthy.”
When the 3D technique is combined with screening for lung cancer and tumors are detected earlier, patients are identified earlier and a small piece of lung can be removed with keyhole surgery. Lex Maat: “For example, if you screen smokers for lung cancer, you will find small tumors that you can remove early. Smokers may have an increased risk of cancer recurrence, but you still offer them an enormous gain in life.”
Augmented reality
The doctors think that the use of VR glasses can quickly be applied in other hospitals in the Netherlands. The invention will be patented this month.
Amir Sadeghi can imagine that the technique will be further developed into augmented reality in the future: “Then you project the images you see over the patient, so that you can see the anatomy of the patient’s tissue in real time.”
He expects that the VR technology will also be useful in the long term for operations of other organs. “The first results with us are very promising and we have also excited some other surgeons in our hospital.”
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