Photo: Surgery Academy
Google Glass is being used to fly drones, make porn, and infiltrate movie theaters and restaurants, but can it be used to teach surgery? One startup thinks so.
It’s called Surgery Academy, and it’s the “first massive open online course applied to surgery.” It sounds like an insane idea, but no, you’re not going to be able to learn how to do surgery just by watching a surgeon wearing Google Glass doing one. And not just anyone is going to be allowed to sign up, at least not at first. Armando Iandolo, an app developer who is heading up the project, says that it’ll be a replacement for the cramped, stadium-style surgery auditoriums where student surgeons witness their first surgeries.
“Imagine a world where a student in Ho Chi Minh can watch a heart bypass being done in an operating room in New York,” he said. “The operating rooms are going to be opened up with this.”
The idea, he says, came to him in a dream.
“I was the patient, and I woke up, and saw all the people looking at me,” he said. “They told me my aorta had died.”
It’s unclear whether any patients who are under anesthesia are going to feel any better about their surgery being broadcast online than rather than having a few med school students watching, but it’s not the first time that someone has thought of using Google Glass in the operating room.
Last year, Rafael Grossman, a general trauma surgeon, live streamed an abdominal surgery using Glass to a tablet kept in the OR for privacy purposes. Grossman wrote that the experience showed that Glass is one of several “intuitive tools that have a great potential in Healthcare” and that Glass “could allow better intra-operative consultations, surgical mentoring and potential remote medical education in a very simple way.”
Glass certainly offers some benefits over a typical surgical operation: Doctors can take screenshots of certain things and can later discuss them, and the app will supposedly show a patient’s vital signs and other important information on a heads-up display. In the future, Iandolo says it might even change how surgeons operate.
“The future is near and inevitable. A surgeon will one day come to the rescue of another surgeon, remotely,” he said.
The group has started a crowd funding campaign that’s still in its infancy, but hopes to begin a beta program at Italy's Universita degli Studi di Milano in June and launch the full app and online course by early next year.
Allowing surgery students to virtually get into the classrooms makes sense, but long term, Iandolo says he has bigger plans—and they’re exactly what you think they might be. He thinks that eventually augmented reality will allow Surgery Academy to train anyone who wants to do surgery, which is kind of a scary thought.
“People will begin to accept virtual surgery training,” he said. “We are starting this adventure because we think that the university is no longer a temple of knowledge for just a select few.”
