The AR Show: John Black and Mina Fahim (MediView) on Giving Surgeons X-Ray Vision in the Operating Room | Otter.ai

The AR Show: John Black and Mina Fahim (MediView) on Giving Surgeons X-Ray Vision in the Operating Room

Jason McDowall1h 13min

Jason McDowall

00:03

Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall.

Jason McDowall

00:14

today's conversation is with john black and Mina Fahim, the CEO and CTO of MediView, a company working to give healthcare practitioners X ray vision in order to simplify minimally invasive procedures, enhance clinical workflow and improve patient outcomes using augmented reality. John black, MediView's co-founder and CEO, is a physiologist with an educational background in orthopedic sports medicine in cardiopulmonary physiology. He moved from allied health to the medical device industry early in his career. Prior to meta view, John was leading a sales organization as the Regional Vice President at Orthofix, a global medical device company. Mina Fahim, MediView's president and CTO, studied Biomedical Engineering and Technology Management as part of his career in medical device innovation. Prior to MediView, Mina spent four and a half years at Medtronic as a principal research development engineer. In this conversation, John and Mina discussed the unique challenges and opportunities for using AR during surgery here, Mina describes the vision for their solution.

Mina Fahim

01:12

So imagine, if the clinician could be sitting at his desk, pop his AR head mounted display on maybe in the future of Messina require an HMD. But they see the patient specific anatomy sitting at their desk, just like Iron Man, they can scroll through it, rotate it, expand it, just like Jarvis allows Iron Man to do and plan the trajectory, plan the optimal therapeutic site, save it, bring it along with him to the day of surgery, registered to the patient see under the skin in real time, and actually guide his instrument there. There's just a flow. And it is an intuition in that potential workflow that we're working towards, at the end of the day, to make the job of the clinician easier and more predictable, so that the outcomes for the patient are more durable, and more consistent. Regardless of whether you're practicing in downtown New York, or Duluth, Minnesota.

Jason McDowall

02:09

We go on to discuss the benefits and lessons learned from their partnership with the Cleveland Clinic, and how they see the landscape of immersive technology in the operating room. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, V AR show calm, let's dive in. John and Mina, what opens your eyes to the potential of AR in surgery?

John Black

02:29

So during my entire life, I always struggled with the left brain world didn't necessarily mean that I couldn't achieve things, it just means that I was a right brained individual trying to learn in a left brain world, in a rural Ohio community, which really, really emphasized that left brain in this. So you know, my entire life I was kind of brought up as you know, having to try a little bit harder to achieve, you know, kind of landing in that that not mediocre, but not extraordinary, despite the amount of effort you'd put into it. And as I got into my professional career, I found myself working in medical imaging, and orthopedic trauma. And so you'd have a lot of these two dimensional screens that would be put up in these, you know, very high pressure situations where decisions are made rapidly, and they have real consequences in a trauma setting. And when I found this, I was excelling at that. And there was a time that I recall, in a pediatric case where we were under pressure, you know, get the kid off anesthesia. And the physician had a really hard time visualizing where a piece of hardware had broken, it was lodged in the canal of the bone. And I'm standing there like, if you put your hand in here, and swivel this foot phlebotomy hook in a counterclockwise motion, you're going to hook the tip of that drill bit and just jiggle your hands, it'll fall right out. That's me standing 12 feet away, where now I had finally found this equalizer where you know, physicians being as brilliant as they are, tend to have more success when their left brain, it's really rare to find somebody who has that combination of both. So I found myself being a little bit of an asset and had a role that I played. And even though it was a very small role, I loved it. I wasn't Oh are junk. And, you know, despite that role you play, you always want the best for every patient and every kid or every adult that comes into the operating suite. And when I evaluated the technology in its raw state at the Cleveland Clinic in 2016, I knew that that was the ultimate equalizer that that this world of grainy, two dimensional world that you have to use to solve these highly three dimensional problems could finally end and I know that makes a disadvantage because now my role becomes less and my value proposition goes down but I think it's in the betterment of everything healthcare to embrace that and the visualization that you can achieve with augmentation. And just the deeper levels of understanding. So that was really what drew me to it and why I hung up everything I worked so hard to get to. And through the way in a second just for this, this technology,

Jason McDowall

05:12

it's amazing that we as humans are very much 3d creatures, that the way that we think about the world is very much about 3d. But here, physically, these surgeons are operating on a 3d environment, it's very difficult to capture that imagery, certainly, in real time. But regardless of whether it's before time, and you kind of rendering and modeling these sorts of things, so you can do this pre op sort of planning or whatever happens to be, we are 3d creatures. And so all of your right rein emphasis early on, it really comes to play in this trying to help the surgeons, I can imagine how this really helps the surgeons apply this sort of new technology in these novel ways that isn't quite as tied to the rote memorization exercises, maybe the doctors were had to excel apps in order to get to the position that they're in today. I mean, if you have any, any fun ones,

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