Helmet Would Magnify Work for Surgeons
What do jet fighter pilots and surgeons have in common? They both try to keep their attention riveted on their jobs and dislike distractions.
Fighter pilots make use of a technology that projects information from the control panels of their jets onto the faceplates of their helmets, enabling them to see vital flight data at all times without taking their gaze off the horizon.
A start-up company in San Clemente called FMX Vision Inc. hopes to incorporate a similar technology in a helmet for surgeons.
Dave Cornett, president and chief executive of the firm, said it is developing a helmet with two miniature cameras that will produce highly magnified three-dimensional pictures of anatomy during surgery.
He said the helmet is intended to replace clumsy and distracting microscopes. Microsurgery is an expanding field of medicine, he said, as neuro- and orthopedic surgeons learn to work with minute nerves and blood vessels.
The product is the brainchild of Dr. John Frazee, associate professor of neurosurgery at the UCLA School of Medicine and chief of neurosurgery at Wadsworth Veterans Hospital, and Roger Malcolm, president of EOT, a San Clemente firm that makes specialized surgical products.
Since September, FMX has raised $280,000 from investors for development. The principal investor is Ray Williams, a Palo Alto entrepreneur who specializes in starting medical and computer firms. Cornett said the firm is courting venture capital companies in an effort to raise another $1.5 million to complete development of a prototype.
The system FMX is developing, Cornett said, would use a computer to magnify and perhaps color the image taken by tiny video cameras mounted on a helmet above a surgeon’s eyes. It might be used, for instance, to provide a sharp picture of a tumor to be removed.
At a surgeon’s voice command, the magnified and clarified image would be projected onto a portion of the front plate of his helmet. Once the surgeon got his bearings, he could issue yet another command that would make the magnification disappear.
Besides giving the surgeon a magnified vision of his work in progress, the computer could store early diagnostic images of a patient that could be projected on the helmet face for the surgeon to study, Cornett said.
“We don’t have to invent anything,” he said. “The miniature cameras are available, the miniature cath-ray tubes are available and the imaging processing technology is available. We just have to put them together in a system.”
He said similar helmets might also replace low-power microscopes used by quality control inspectors in the assembly of medical devices and electronic components. And manufacturers could maintain video archives of on-line inspections that could be referred to when a malfunction occurs.
HEADS-UP HELMET FOR MICROSURGEONS
Engineers at FMX Vision of San Clemente have designed a helmet that gives surgeons the next best thing to microscopic eyes. Camera lenses mounted in a lightweight helmet generate stereoscopic images, magnified up to 25 times, which are projected onto the inside of the helmet’s faceplate.
Microsurgery is typically performed using binocular microscopes controlled by foot pedals.
A pair of voice-controlled lenses mounted in the helmet designed by FMX Vision display a magnified image on the inside of the faceplate. Source: FMX Vision Inc.
