During his recent visit to Dubai, UAE, Abdul Latif Jameel Health spoke to eminent surgeon Dr. Maki Sugimoto (杉本真樹) MD PhD FICS, Professor at the Innovation Lab, Teikyo University Okinaga Research Institute and Co-Founder & CEO, Holoeyes Inc., about the rise of the metaverse and AI in medical, and particularly, surgical practice.

The innovative Holoeyes extended reality capability has far-reaching application in personalized surgical procedure planning and education.

In the video, Dr Sugimoto says:

“The metaverse allows us to do things that cannot be done easily, such as distance, time and space.  Surgical practice is very difficult to learn without the patient or actual medical field, so the metaverse can replace the actual medical field training for a young student or the young surgeons.

“In order to make you understand the advantage of the VR Technology, you need to put on the VR goggles and actually experience the metaverse itself.”

He outlines the two different headset options – the VR goggles or the mixed reality options – the latter of which is the transparent display for the right and left eye, which allows surgeons to see the patient’s anatomy in the ‘air’ by using two different lenses.

“The immersive experience is really useful to understand the patient anatomy and the other surgeons’ movement using the metaverse.  By using a CAT scan or MRI, we can deconstruct a 3D image of the front, and plane by plane data to a 3D using the polygon technology.”

Abdul Latif Jameel Health and Holoeyes Inc. announced a new strategic collaboration in November 2021 to bring the 3D VR technology to a potential 2.4 million physicians across selected markets in the Middle East and Africa.  The partnership aims to contribute to the enhanced efficiency and safety of surgery, improving standards and quality of medical education through advanced medical imaging technology.

Holoeyes VR tech

Dr Sugimoto concludes:

“After five years or ten years, I think everybody can access the metaverse using these goggles because the price will go down and everybody can buy these VR headsets, like a smartphone.

“This integrates the knowledge for medicine or medical treatment by the ordinary people, not the surgeon or physicians, so we can gather that knowledge itself in the metaverse world so that everybody can access the metaverse to learn.”