I just saw a report on CTV News about a brilliant use of a new technology, Microsoft Kinect for XBox 360. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a motion control system for the gaming console that lets you move your character in a game by moving your body. It uses a camera to pick up an image of your body and translate your movements into the game.
Surgeons at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital have used it in a way that I’m sure Microsoft’s developers never envisioned – to select and manipulate medical images that they view on a monitor during surgery. Previously, they had to use a mouse, which meant that they had to leave the operating room and scrub again before resuming surgery. Now they just wave their hands in the air. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as they had to develop a gesture vocabulary and program it into the system, but that’s the idea.
With better control over the images, surgeons can be more precise, Law said. For a cancer surgeon, that could mean saving more healthy tissue when removing a tumour, he said.
The idea to bring the Kinect into the operating room came from three engineers — Jamie Tremaine, Greg Brigley and Matt Strickland.
Strickland, who doubles as a general surgery resident at the University of Toronto, first spotted the challenges surgeons face in viewing images during surgery, according to Tremaine.
The Kinect seemed like a good solution, he said.
The console is a depth camera, meaning it sees in 3-D. It then creates a digital skeleton of the person captured on camera and tracks how the skeleton moves. Those motions are translated into commands.
The engineers worked closely with surgeons at Sunnybrook to find command gestures that could be used in the operating room without compromising surgery procedures, Law said.
Minority Report interfaces may be with us sooner than we think.