We’ve done several blogs about the rising use of technology in medicine. The latest development is medicine copying the magic of the big screen. The use of surgical imaging is expected to grow tremendously over the next several years, with HD and 3D visualization on the way. With surgical imaging, physicians can “see” inside the patient and plan the operation in detail, including avoiding anatomic variations that might otherwise make the surgery more difficult. Much of this development is coming from developments in the film world.

The use of such imaging also allows medical students to “operate” on patients who are depicted in imaging films and who will react to the scalpel or other surgical tool the same way a patient’s body would react. A student can operate on an obese patient and learn to find his or her way through the adipose tissue, or can do an operation on a patient who has adhesions (internal scarring) from previous operations. If “practice makes perfect,” the medical student can now practice on the images of patients rather than patients themselves.

The only caveat to this development is that, with technology growing and changing at such a rapid rate, the cost of surgical or other medical care grows with it. No one opts for a simple x-ray when an MRI or PET scan can provide much more information to help formulate a diagnosis or plan a treatment regimen. A good example is the burgeoning use of “robotic” surgery in the U.S. Twenty years ago that would have been a scene from a science fiction movie. Today, more and more surgeries are done robotically and a surgeon who doesn’t adapt to this new technology may find patients seeking out another surgeon who has.