Dr. Brent Kimball had an equivalent of X-ray vision when he looked down at his spinal surgery patient in an operating room earlier in January. A neurosurgeon at Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree, Dr. Kimball used a headset that augmented his vision and let him look inside his patient’s body without opening it up.

Kimball said, “We can actually see where the spine is underneath the skin, the fat, the muscle tissue, the ligaments, we can see where the nerves are, we can see where everything is without even making an incision. It allows the approach, the planning, to be very, very precise.”

The state-of-the-art technology allowed him to be extremely precise. He was able to relieve the patient’s lower back and leg pain which was being caused due to a slipped vertebrae. 

“Accuracy is really important. There’s a lot of nerves nearby and they’re very, very sensitive to even the smallest inaccuracies,” he added.

The headset, manufactured by Augmedics, is made to custom fit each user. Through a press release, Sky Ridge announced that it has become the first hospital in the Denver metro area to lay hands on the device.

The augmented reality technology works by layering 3D computer-generated images over the user’s real-world environment through the headset.

“I feel like this technology allows me to take what I’ve mastered and amplified it in a way that the surgery is more precise, safer, faster, and there’s more confidence in it,” Kimball said.

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