Hospital To Livestream A Cancer Operation In Virtual Reality

Livestreaming in virtual reality isn’t new. In fact if anything, Samsung already did that when they launched their Galaxy S7 handsets in which one of the livestream options was to watch it in virtual reality. Now if you’re curious about what goes on in an operating theater, you might be interested to learn that you will be able to tune into a livestream of a cancer operation next month where it will also be streamed in virtual reality.

This livestream will come from the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and will allow anyone with a virtual reality headset, such as the Google Cardboard, to tune into the stream. The doctor who will be performing the operation is Dr. Shafi Ahmed where it will be a two-hour operation, with the goal being to show people what cancer patients are sometimes subject to when they go under the knife.

Thanks to it being virtual reality, users will be able to position themselves anywhere and also view the operation from all angles. We expect that there might be some who are squeamish so you guys will probably want to skip this, but if you are genuinely curious or maybe you’re a medical student looking to gain some extra knowledge and experience, this should be a good learning experience.

This is pretty much what Ahmed has in mind as well. According to him, “We’ve got to think about this because this is expensive medicine. Medical companies take you on the road — actually do you need to? Why not give people headsets? Teach people remotely. They don’t have to be barricaded.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Medical
Tags: Health, Virtual Reality (VR)