Canadian hospital using Kinect in surgery

Did you know rescrubbing for surgery can take doctors like twenty minutes?

That’s like a whole episode of Arrested Development. But surgeons need to reference stuff like images while surgery-ing, and it’s a pain in the ass they have to deal with, or people would have like, jellybean germs in their surgical incisions. A hospital in Canada, however, has implemented the use of Kinect to manipulate images during surgical procedures.

Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto is believed to be the only hospital using the Kinect in such a fashion, and Dr. Calvin Law underscored the system’s amazing benefits for surgeons:

Those interruptions sometimes cause more than an hour’s delay over the course of a surgery, said Law, a surgical oncologist with the hospital’s gastrointestinal cancer team.

“It all adds up,” he said. By eliminating those delays, the hospital could save enough time to operate on more patients, he said.

If such technology becomes more widespread, doctors say it could help make surgery even more precise, and cut down on OR time per patient, allowing more patients to get treatment.